Creditinfo Cookbook
Creditinfo_We_are_family
Cooking is the basis for relationships.
For many, family mealtime has been lost in our over-scheduled lives. Family meals provide an opportunity to come together, strengthen ties and build better relationships. They are an opportunity to reconnect and handle the stresses of daily life – build a sense of belonging.
Food confers the status and identity with which we distinguish ourselves from others and at the same time gives us the sense of community we seek. Those who eat as we do have a connection with us; they are as we are.
Let’s gather around the table or on the mat and eat together this season. This book is a glimpse of the different forms of communal dining in our Creditinfo ecosystem. Whether in Iceland or Guyana – “Dinner is served!”.
We’re about to eat, so drop what you are doing and join us.
Download the whole Creditinfo Cookbook for offline viewing here.
Banking for the future of Sri Lanka
Interview with Thimal Perera – Deputy CEO, DFCC Bank
Our Senior Business Development Manager, Joe Bowerbank, caught up with Thimal Perera, Deputy CEO of DFCC Bank. Thimal provided a number of interesting insights into how DFCC is strategically dealing with the challenges of operating in 2020 and building a roadmap to continue delivering a first-class banking experience going forward. Thimal has worked in both local and international banks across the globe, looking after a number of different areas from SME and retail, to digital transformation amongst others. This interview focuses on digitalization and credit risk – two areas that have been hot topics for Creditinfo’s clients this year.
Experts give their take on the future of the credit industry post COVID-19
While Skype and Zoom become the new office, we had the great pleasure to interview two titans of the credit industry; Paul Randall – Global Markets Director at Creditinfo Group, and Oscar Madeddu, Senior Advisor at IFC, World Bank. With a new reality unfolding through disruption of to our daily life, we felt the necessity to ask the veterans of our industry what the future could look like in a post-COVID society. We asked our interviewees to share ideas on how the crisis will impact economies, credit, credit reporting and what authorities around the world are and should be doing to safeguard borrowers, lenders without endangering the integrity of credit reporting databases.
Creditinfo’s “CIP Score” Between evolution and improvement: a powerful tool for risk management in a more digital financial environment
The core business of commercial banks and other lenders, at the most basic level, is to sell money. To loan an amount with a negotiated re-payment schedule with interest, is a process that allows the economy to finance itself. But for this cycle to be sustainable in the long term, it must be carried out with both vigilance and responsibility. The “credit risk” of a client, their probability of reimbursement, and differentiating between “good” and “bad” clients are basic yet essential elements to loan in a profitable and durable manner.
A Wake up Call for a New Humanism
The privilege of living where I don’t feel threatened by systematic discrimination doesn’t mean I can turn a blind eye and pretend this is not impacting me. It is affecting my friends, my colleagues, millions of people I don’t know, and the world, we, as parents, leave to our children.
Thanks to Creditinfo, Estonia becomes the competence center of open banking
The Head of the company says a positive credit register is needed for boosting the Estonian credit market. Stefano Stoppani, Dubai-based Chairman of the Board of Creditinfo providing business information, solvency assessment and market analysis, intended to visit its offices in Estonia and the other Baltic countries in the beginning of March, but COVID-19 hampered with these plans. Europe is cautious in regulating both data protection and open banking. The aim of the PSD2 directive is to give third parties – licensed companies – access to a person’s bank account information. This is not done just because, but for providing better service, and obviously the account holder must authorize this. The third-party, for example, the creditor, can then see the income of the person and what the money is spent on. Information is needed to determine if the person is able to pay back the loan (s)he wants.
Mobile Lending: Non-traditional data in credit decision making
Retail lending in Kenya has taken a unique path. It has skipped some stages typical for developed markets and climbed to heights that can be admired and envied. Ironically, this happened not due to economical advantages but rather due to certain historical deficiencies.
New CEO at Creditinfo Eesti
Creditinfo Eesti AS, the largest Estonian credit information and risk management services provider, will have a change of lead starting 1 June 2017, as former CEO Veiko Meos joins the Supervisory Board, while Ege Metsandi takes on the steering wheel of the company.
Interview with Paul Randall
Paul, why all those corporate changes and the fuss around the new Decision Analytics unit at Creditinfo?
Well, those are exciting times for the industry and for Creditinfo. Decision Analytics is right at the core of it all. The industry is changing and we are changing. The recent restructuring made our corporate structure more agile, empowering the international sales and consulting department (CIDA, as we are called right now) to bring Creditinfo sales to another level. This means that we are better prepared, better synchronized and are becoming much more aggressive in going to market as well as in dealing with our current customers and assisting them throughout their whole customer lifecycle.
To be more concrete, there are 2 main benefits that occurred after the change:
1) we are better synchronized to sell international products ourselves;
2) we can cooperate and use international synergies to better serve our local credit bureaus.
The second part is really critical for the Group. When Creditinfo is providing both decision solutions and credit bureau solutions to the same customer. Both parties will sell more of their products and we are less likely to lose either part to a competitor. I have seen this be a very effective strategy over the years working in many credit bureau. I believe that this is really important and will contribute in helping Creditinfo achieve its growth ambitions for 2020.
Most of the products sold by Decision Analytics unit today have been previously sold by Creditinfo Solutions. What products would become priority following the change, in your opinion?
The first thing I would say is that our aim is to provide solutions to our customer’s problems, for that we would normally provide a combination of a number of products.
CIDA products fall under 2 categories: the sale of credit bureau & related software and decision analytic, software & consulting products, which basically enable to turn raw data into intelligent information, such as our application processing engine for instance. I want to emphasize that we paint a bright future for our consultancy services, considering the complexity of our industry and the brilliant analytic resources we have to serve it. Yes, many of the products are created and delivered by Creditinfo Solutions, there may be other products delivered by other teams in the Group or possibly some third party solutions which are not in our repertoire at the moment.
What we envision to do, is to incorporate credit bureau data deep within an institution’s infrastructure, making of it an inseparable part of every single credit decision that is being made on the clients’ side. The more we integrate, the more barriers we build for potential competition to enter the market or for existing competitors to displace our credit bureau within a client. This is a long-term strategy to build strong relationships and gain customer loyalty. As far as priority products are concerned, well, everybody should be familiar with our CBS5 and the basic value added products that we provide, such being our monitoring or scoring service, as well as some of the newer ones: benchmarking, portfolio screening, batch processing, collateral registry service, collections system…
On the decision products our BEE decision engine, credit scores, behavioural scores, Application Processing Systems, consultancy are the core products but this is just the starting point. The key is maybe not the products by themselves, but the understanding of how we, at Decision Analytics can help our clients to cross-sell and up-sell. This is simply mandatory nowadays, but not self-evident. We need to support our customers on a daily basis, to make sure that we don’t miss opportunities and that we are the first contact they would use in case they’d have a question related to credit decisioning.
OK, so how do you go to market?
Changes are falling into place and despite the fact that we already have a strong and experienced team of consultants, analytics and sales people, we are about to grow and hire more region-specific staff, to be closer to our regional clients. We are about to have new, but experienced professionals to join us in Asia and Africa, as those are the positions that are being filled as we speak. We believe that more professional staff working closer to our international clients would help making a difference. So you will find DA staff or agents are already in Kenya, Monaco, Iceland, Singapore, Azerbaijan as well as Prague and this will continue to evolve with interviews recently in Cote d’Ivoire, Jamaica and Morocco.
How will these international CI DA experts cooperate with local offices? Will they compete or will they support? How will that work?
Creditinfo is one company and we will all be working and cooperating as a team, but with parallel objectives working in the same direction. In many of the cases it might end-up being integrated sales, which would result in a win-win situation and benefit both: the bureaus and CIDA. Let me give you an example: we were working with a major bank in Kenya on a very exciting project, consisting of implementing scoring and decision consultancy for mobile lending products. We sold our expertise via consultancy and credit scores, nevertheless, a very important part of that same sale and that solution was credit bureau data and credit bureau scores from our credit bureau in Kenya. It’s a fantastic case we hope to replicate as many times as we can.
Thank you Paul and all the best!
Cheers.
Welcome to the Creditinfo Family in Kenya
Nancy Kinyanjui
Nancy joins the Creditinfo team in Kenya as Product Manager. Continue reading »
