Cortex Inclusion Advocacy in Banking: Collections
Cortex Certifai is enabling the banking industry to inspect data and models for bias, fairness, explainability, and accuracy – and address risks such as credit or collections discrimination.
When consumers fall into arrears with their payments, collection processes are initiated. Consumers repay their loans with banks/creditors on more suitable terms and banks are to recover outstanding monies.
CognitiveScale Collection offerings ensure that all customers are treated fairly during the collection process and that no undue bias exists within collections processes, minimizing the financial impact and reputation to both customers and the bank.
The Question of Fairness and Opportunity
- Are all customers given the same opportunity to adjust their repayment options?
- Are some customers and demographics receiving unfair repayment terms and conditions?
- In the case where financial institutions are proactively screening their customers for early signs of financial issues, are all customers treated fairly?
- Do specific groups of users fall through the preventative net?
Preventative measures in pre-delinquency detection.
The focus is on identifying customers before they become delinquent.
Customers benefit from this service as they may be able to gain financial relief, prevent emotional stress, and negative credit ratings. The banks gain by developing deeper relationships with their customers, reduced levels of defaults, and financial provisioning whilst enhancing their credibility and trust with customers.
Fairness & Equality in Collections.
During a collection process typically a bank/creditor will have many touchpoints with their customers; emails, letters and phone calls. It is important to ensure that all customers are treated and communicated fairly during this process and that no one group of individuals faces harsher debt management treatment because of where they live or earnings.
Optimising a debt portfolio through Debt Allocation and Debt Sale
Banks have different strategies for debt recovery, from engaging with third-party vendors for debt collection to cutting their losses and selling the debt on.
In debt sales, banks/creditors will want to understand the characteristics of a debt portfolio in order to maximize the value of the portfolio. Cortex can be used as the platform to design and build portfolio valuation strategies and customer profiling scores whilst Certifai is used to ensure that the models are optimal and that maximum value can be achieved.
Outcomes
- Understand the impact of both automated/manual decisions within the collection process. Assess collections process for bias and overall fairness
- Enhance confidence in the reliability and trustworthiness of the collections capability
- Ability to score customers on their ability to repay loans
- Ability to create a range of intelligent forward flow and spot value strategies that can be orchestrated to maximise the value to the business
- Cortex Inclusion Advocacy in Banking: Credit
- Access to credit services enables people to engage fruitfully in society, ride cash flow difficulties, finance larger purchases such as transportation, education, housing, and finance medical needs.
For entrepreneurial individuals, it enables people to take ideas to market, create employment and wealth for both the individual and the wider economy. When individuals are denied access to financial services it creates classes of people who are either unbanked or underbanked.
The Underbanked
As an example, the underbanked include customers that have been refused loans and now need to seek alternative sources of finance. Often loan models employ intelligent processing which is used to determine if a customer is creditworthy of the loan. Using CognitiveScale Certifai a creditor would be able to detect potential bias issues with loan models and provide banks with a human-readable explanation. Such services would encourage higher levels of financial inclusion.
The personal and societal issues of being unbanked or underbanked are not constrained to developing countries. In North America, 7.7% of the population are believed to be unbanked and 17.7% underbanked and in 2017 there were 1.7 billion people worldwide without a bank account.
Outcomes
- New / Augmented Credit Scoring to enable financial inclusion
- Enhanced Customer profiling to drive innovative financial risk and lending models
- Intelligence Customer engagement, through the use of web and mobile channels using enhanced communication; the right message at the right time on the right platform.
Why CognitiveScale
Using Cortex, our platform for orchestrating intelligent processes, we are able to integrate with different data sources, services, and technology solutions to provide new indicators and profiling capabilities to the bank/creditor. The Cortex platform rapidly designs, builds, deploys, and manages intelligent services.
The CognitiveScale Cortex platform has the ability to leverage new data sources, services to create enhanced customer profiling. Creating solutions for financial inclusion will open new markets for banks and is very likely to involve intelligent systems and processes for low profitability accounts.