After the US Federal Reserve announced the most considerable interest rate increase in almost 30 years, funders are also reviewing their terms and tightening underwriting rules.
Now, more than before, it is vital to understand the factors that influence performance; our experience is that apparent factors don’t always tell the whole story and may even give you the wrong idea.
But not only that, once you decide on changes, how long does it take for you to know if those changes affected the outcome? Are you constantly fine-tuning? How deep can you go?
Does your system have constant feedback for your Underwriting?
How does Business Intelligence contribute to the MCA industry?
We currently live in a world that produces a vast amount of data from disparate systems and many intermediate manual processes. This environment puts decision-makers at risk of using a too-late distorted version of the truth for effectively managing their portfolio. Identifying the reasons for low performance or opportunities for better performance becomes a real challenge, and this is where the Business Intelligence discipline kicks in.
Business intelligence is a set of skills that will help you build the best possible and consistent version of the truth of your business for better decision-making. It will systematize the cradle-to-grave process, from gathering the data to providing valuable insights and scenario testing for improving performance. As counterintuitive as it may seem, the critical skill required to provide effective BI is specific industry depth of knowledge. Of course, technical skills such as databases, data modeling, and statistics are necessary. Still, the BI effort will fall short of expectations if you don’t understand the industry to be analyzed.
Among other advantages, business intelligence and analysis provide:
- Futuristic vision: BI provides future strategic information, not just a retrospective view of financial reports.
- Data becomes constant up-to-date information: It helps to analyze and interpret large amounts of data quickly and easily.
- Information becomes more visual: BI helps present data and results visually to make them easier to understand.
- More credibility: It helps increase the value and credibility of the finance function as a strategic partner.
- Operational process improvements: Operational process shortcomings become evident and are addressed, improving efficiency and reliability
Choosing better leads to reduce risk.
The MCA industry faces many risks: fraud, credit risks, and customer changing behavior, and business Intelligence is an effective defense against these threats.
Identifying fraud, for example, is easier with BI. This is mainly due to its ability to rapidly process and explore large volumes of data, including unstructured data. It is possible to build predictive rules by analyzing the history of fraud. This allows us to create robust models that alert organizations in real-time as soon as a suspicious event occurs.
In the face of credit risks, BI is also a valuable ally. For example, data exploration can determine a business’s ability to repay a loan. By crossing different data sources, it is possible to assign each applicant a highly reliable score. This evaluation, which is long and laborious without BI, becomes almost instantaneous.
The best way to analyze a multi-variable problem such as credit risk is by using the sophisticated techniques used in Analytics. If you think that four variables determine the outcome, think again.
Can FICO, Time in Business, and Lien Position provide a complete picture?
When talking with people interested in the use of data, many seem to rely on dashboards as the source of information, which is fine, but we also know that analytics goes far beyond dashboards.
After years of expertise in analytics and the MCA business, we went beyond pretty pictures and have developed insightful dashboards and AI/ML models to score and, thus, pick deals to support Underwriting, achieving outstanding results. These models provide constant feedback to your decision-making; therefore, they adapt faster and better to environmental changes.
Similar models can also improve operational processes, allowing for scaling with confidence and reducing risk. In addition, our models learn from mistakes, so they adjust automatically, always pursuing the best chances of success when picking and pricing deals.
The MCA industry is undoubtedly a vast “data producer” but, in our experience, not great in transforming data into an asset. This makes it imperative to have a method for gathering, managing, and utilizing this vast amount of data. Business Intelligence appropriately implemented has nothing but advantages: from monitoring financial KPIs to producing regulatory reports, risk management, and laying scenarios. Therefore, BI can provide a bright future for MCA industry players more than ever.
Interested in finding out how we can help? Let’s jump on a quick meeting with our team.