It may seem like a contradiction, but in some regards, tax offices are both data rich and data poor.  Tax offices have a significant amount of data, predominantly from business registration forms and tax return filings available to them.  This means that they have financial data, employment information, corporate data, and some demographic data.  Tax agencies often have extensive data warehouses which consolidate the data they possess, allowing for extensive analyses. However, tax offices often lack additional data that would help them build stronger tax analytics to achieve their tax compliance mission.  This missing data includes demographic data, such as phone numbers, email address, aliases and a comprehensive list of physical addresses.  It also includes data which doesn’t have to be reported to tax agencies, such as bank account, property and asset information. In addition, tax agencies typically lack the ability to consolidate their data with external data because often... [Read More]

In the first of my three-part blog series on reinventing the origination process I discussed how digital transformation has reshaped consumers expectation from the companies they do business with – which means that leading financial institutions must transform their customer experience as well if they wish to remain competitive. In the second part of my series, I want to focus on improving the customer experience, through customer information management focusing on speed, efficiency, and customer engagement. Develop a Holistic Approach to Customer Information Across the Organization There are few things that irritate a customer more than providing the bank with information they already have. Nothing screams “you are not important” more than having to provide my address to the very institution that helped me secure a mortgage to buy my property in the first place. Connecting legacy systems can be a messy and expensive venture, but the benefits of implementing... [Read More]

“FICO’s DMP has helped us consolidate multiple underwriting processes and solutions across the enterprise into a centralized underwriting/decision management platform that can scale across verticals, product lines and regions."

Here's how decision optimisation can improve cardholders' strategies to comply with persistent debt regulation and help consumers meet their credit burdens.

A recent Bloomberg article asserted that “consumer credit scores have been artificially inflated over the past decade,” as credit scores have steadily increased over the past decade of economic expansion.  The conclusion cited is that “debtors are riskier than their scores indicate because the metrics don’t account for the robust economy, skewing perception of borrowers’ ability to pay bills on time”. So are FICO® Scores “artificially inflated?”  The simple answer is no. FICO Scores Are Not Fixed Estimates of Credit Risk The FICO® Score is designed to rank-order the likelihood that a borrower will repay their loan(s), with higher scoring borrowers representing lower risk, and lower scoring borrowers representing higher risk.  The aim of the FICO® Score is to ensure that a pool of borrowers scored as a 660 at a given point in time represent lower risk of default than a pool of borrowers scored as a 620 at that... [Read More]

My last two posts on persistent debt in the UK focused on compliance and prevention. Here’s a different angle: Can issuers actually compete in this area?