Credit API hubs 101

With the large drive in account origination towards digitisation and automation, web services have become increasingly critical in the originations’ process. To enable web services, ideally lenders should look to adopting an API hub. In this blog, we unpack API hubs and APIs available in originations.

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Case study: Credit Scoring – Leveraging the power of collective wisdom for regional lending

Abstract: An African lender operating in 11 countries (13 operations) developed the need to introduce credit scoring into their businesses for the first time. There were many challenges. Firstly, conducting 14 separate scoring projects (each requiring multiple scorecards) would be expensive and secondly, some books were too small to support the building of an individual bespoke scorecard. There was however a solution: The African Master Scorecard. The solution was successfully deployed within Principa’s SmartSuite and this paper tells the story.

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Mastering The Swiss-Army Knife Of Business Software: The Business Rules Management System

Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS’s) are the Swiss-army knives of business software. Despite this, very few companies we work with are getting the most out of their decision engines.

In this blog, we explore how BRMSs are used across the customer lifecycle.

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The Pros and Cons of a Multi-Bureau Credit Strategy

Although not a new concept, very few lending organisations have deployed a true multi-bureau strategy (MBS). It is however talked about fairly regularly, but often dismissed as “too hard” or “not important enough”. So why should you consider a multi-bureau strategy? What are the key considerations? How do you go about deploying a MBS? This blog hopes to address all these questions.

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What is a credit scorecard?

A scorecard is a mathematical model that is used to predict a certain outcome. In credit this might be the probability of default. The information used in a scorecard can vary, but common fields include demographic characteristics (e.g. age of applicant, number of dependants, time spent in current job) and credit bureau data (e.g. number of personal loans registered to applicant, worst arrears status on all accounts in the last 6 months).

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Model validation and adjustment

The time is NOW for model validation and adjustment.

One of the major premises used in credit scoring is that “the future is like the past”. It’s usually a rational assumption and gives us a reasonable platform on which to build scorecards whether they be application scorecards, behavioural scores, collection scores or financial models. That is reasonable until something unprecedented comes along. You can read about this black swan event in our previous two blogs here and here.

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