Tough economic conditions and changes in legislation are affecting all major consumer and commercial lending sectors in South Africa. As a result, organisations are looking for solutions and strategies that will improve their performance, reduce losses and ultimately provide value to their client relationships.
This was one of the conclusions from Experian’s Business Insights Conference held yesterday in Johannesburg where over 100 local and international experts and guests engaged on issues affecting their sectors and shared market insights.
Michelle Beetar, MD of Experian SA, comments: “The credit industry landscape is changing. More consumers are relying on credit to meet their general living costs, credit legislation is changing – not only in South Africa but globally as well – and credit providers are finding it increasingly difficult to optimise value from their current customers due to a lack of proper customer management tools.”
Among the main speakers at today’s conference was Mario Bianchi, global consultant of Experian Decision Analytics, who provided an overview on key trends impacting the credit industry as well as the challenges and opportunities they present.
“Credit providers are faced with significant headwinds including aggressive growth in credit losses, increasing fraud losses as well as constraints presented by regulatory changes. Credit providers are grappling with how to unlock and optimise value from their existing customers and this is driven by changes in customer behaviour, expectations and legislation.
“But all is not lost – there are still significant opportunities for providers through the use of technologies and advanced decisioning systems which help credit providers transform vast amounts of data into valuable consumer insight.”
He highlighted that Experian can assist them by providing a combination of data, analytics and software to make confident decisions across the entire customer lifecycle including acquiring the right customers, growing customer relationships, retaining good customers and implementing an efficient collections process.
Fraud is another growing trend that costs economies millions year-on-year. David Coleman, head of analytics at Experian SA presented the National Fraud Prevention Solution that enables credit providers to deal with this growing trend.
Coleman highlights that Experian South Africa’s National Fraud Prevention Solution works on a national data-sharing scheme which enables controlled cross-checking of applications across the industry without revealing any commercially sensitive information.
It not only enables an organisation to identify fraudulent customer applications using their own fraud databases – it enables previous application data and fraud intelligence to be shared across organisations which is incredibly powerful in combating application fraud across the entire industry.
Hugh Steed, director at digital fraud prevention organisation 41st Parameter, highlighted the critical need for mobile device intelligence in a multi-channel world. Steed bases this on the fact that there are 25 000 000 estimated unique strains of malware, an 80% annual increase in phishing attacks and over 600-million known customer records that have been breached.
“Our authentication and web fraud detection device can identify hostile behaviour, expose fraud rings, reveal hidden connections and assess risks from multiple angles,” Steed says.
Steve Platt, executive vice-president at Experian Decision Analytics, San Diego, presented advances in big data. “As society becomes more and more digitised, and use of technology increases, we as consumers share and use more data, hence more and more data becoming available. This vast amount of data provides a much deeper understanding of the behaviour of consumers and businesses,” says Platt.
He shared the work that Experian is doing in setting up a network of data labs around the world staffed with scientists hired specifically for their skills in advanced analytics and computing to help organisations clients tackle the challenges that big data can pose.
As well as an array of thought provoking presentations, delegates also had the opportunity to find out about Experian SA’s new solutions which included market leading device authentication, psychographic evaluation as well as innovations in decisioning systems for the telcos and financial services companies.