Pre-qualification

Understand your prospects

In the absence of a full credit check, the best way to obtain the insight you need about your prospect is through shared financial data. For instance, you could pair your data with records from other sources, particularly those derived from credit bureaus. These provide a data-sharing hub for lenders worldwide. Experian’s solutions can connect you to more than 70 global bureaus to provide a more complete picture of an individual’s finances.

Tailoring product offerings

Confirming eligibility for products is one thing, knowing which products are most likely to appeal to your prospect is another. Choose a decisioning tool that’s capable of linking prospects to products that are most likely to be of interest. Experian’s PowerCurve platform offers this functionality through its new Eligibility Check product, which taps into Experian’s data and analytics to make strong recommendations.

Personalise your strategies

Once you’ve developed an idea of your customer's financial needs, how do you balance those with your business strategy to determine which offers to make? One option is to let mathematical decisioning software do the heavy lifting for you.

For example, Experian MarketSwitch Optimisation can automatically evaluate a variety of different priorities – from competing business goals to individual customer needs – before calculating the impact of every possible decision to determine which products to offer based on your appetite for risk.

Create a universal view

Once you’ve determined a customer’s basic eligibility, it’s time to look beyond their basic financial picture to better understand the person. Creating such a universal view requires more than access to additional data – you need to be able to extract the key information to determine which pre-approved products and services might appeal to them. Credit 3D combines machine learning and data science with predictive analytics modelling tools to deliver this insight direct to your screen.

Calculate detailed affordability

While you can never guarantee a customer will be able to pay back their debt – after all, what may be affordable now may not be if their circumstances change – you can at least use smart predictive modelling to gauge their likely long-term value to your business. Credit 3D provides all this plus a dedicated consultancy team to help you maximise the insights available.

Update your strategies

The last few years have proved how difficult it is to predict the future with any degree of accuracy using only the past as a guide. Thankfully, updating your strategies is straightforward using smart machine learning. Consider a platform like Experian’s Ascend Intelligence Services, which can both validate your current models and, if necessary, replace them with a fully built, deployed and tested version to ensure your pre-qualified offers don’t stray beyond your risk appetite.

Provide a dynamic user experience

The obvious way to smooth your customer journey is to identify friction points and look for ways to remove them. Two steps in the journey that often cause issues are verifying identities and assessing affordability, especially if these still rely on laborious manual checks. The simplest way to smooth over these rough points is to integrate external data into your systems that can automate these checks.

Tailor your offering

The greater your customer understanding, the more you can do to personalise your pre-qualified offers. Choose a scorecard system that can feed into information supplied by customers themselves. For example, Experian's Delphi for New Business can incorporate credit-report data volunteered by customers who’ve signed up for Experian Boost.

Check eligibility early

The quicker you can verify your customer’s details and assess their eligibility for your products, the better. Experian’s tools come with the added bonus of inserting pre-qualified deals early into the applications process, which in turn gives your applicants more impetus to complete the journey.

Maximise pre-qualified offers

Once you’ve tempted people to take up your offer, you need to make sure those offers remain visible during the applications process. Experian’s PowerCurve Originations customer acquisition platform combines your data with other sources to allow its automated tools to make informed decisions about the products a customer sees. 

Leverage product cross sell opportunity

A customer who is looking to purchase one type of product can sometimes be tempted to buy a second one. By incorporating pre-qualified offers for complimentary items you can provide more value for your customer and potentially extra business for you too. For example, you could promote house insurance during a mortgage application process.