Smarter Loan Underwriting with Flinks Segment

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A large and diverse customer base is a sign of a healthy business, especially for consumer lenders aiming to achieve sustainable and profitable growth. But as they acquire and retain more and more borrowers across credit pillars, it becomes increasingly challenging to stay on top of their financial behavior and make proactive underwriting improvements on a segmentation basis.

Now, imagine having a bird’s-eye view of how your customers perform against consumer lending benchmarks, and being able to grasp key indicators such as debt-to-credit ratios and spending trends, to name a few, to make more informed and efficient credit decisions.

That’s why our team built Segment—an extended reporting feature of Enrichment—to deliver actionable insights from your customer segmentation and improve your underwriting performance at scale.

Providing an aggregated view of all your customers’ data and comparing that to market trends, Segment offers unparalleled market-level insights specifically focusing on consumer lending parameters and thresholds. Read on to learn how to leverage Flinks Segment to your competitive edge.

What Is Segment & How Does It Work?

Segment, composed of a couple of curated reports generated by your customer data, is an enhanced reporting tool designed to help you optimize loan pricing and adjust underwriting policy so that you can serve your customers better.

Here’s a quick product tour.

Take Your Customer Data Insights to the Next Level

Overview: It paints a picture of your customers’ financing activities, from their average loan payments and deposits to their average NSFs (non-sufficient funds) and overdrafts. By comparing their banking data against Flinks’ benchmarks, you can immediately recognize where your borrowers’ capacity sits in the consumer lending industry.
Loans: This tab helps you visually see your customers’ average payment and deposit breakdown by lenders, as well as your customer distribution per lender. Together it gives you an idea of your positioning in the competitive landscape.
Spendings: This is where you can learn everything you need to know about your customers’ spending habits, from what they spend money on before and after getting a loan to what they spend on before and after getting a payroll deposit.
Segmentation: We break down your customers’ loan segmentation to help you understand how many of them have loans and how many of them don’t. For the ones who have loan payments, you also have the ability to see if they are from you, other lender(s), or both.

What Can You Do with Segment?

Data is most valuable when it’s made actionable. To develop Segment, we utilized market feedback and our experience supporting 200+ different lenders in analyzing the bank data of their users. This provides actionable insights pertinent to lenders ranging in sizes, business models, and service offerings.

Segment improves the use of your customer data and unlocks growth opportunities that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Improve underwriting performance

We’ve made it easier for you to understand your customer base through a snapshot of their average income and expense distribution. This helps you find correlations between certain purchasing behaviors and poor debt-to-income ratio (DTI), as well as flag any spending habits such as gambling and crypto investments to mitigate risks.

By looking at specific characteristics of your customer segmentation (even rejected customers), you can improve the criteria you use when evaluating loan applications and proactively adjust your loan pricing models and risk appetite for more efficient underwriting.

Increase profitability in a competitive market

Segment is the optimal way to compare yourself against your competitors by revealing the distribution of lenders. This way, you can divide all your customer relationships based on their loan payments, and make smarter decisions for your acquisition and retention strategy.

By looking at how many of your customers have loan payments with other lenders but not with you, you can gain a more accurate understanding of your customer base within the consumer lending market. This helps you better position yourself with those customers against your competitors.

Unlock new business opportunities

Working closely with our customers, Flinks has found that it is a common challenge for lenders to drive loan growth and increase customer lifetime value (LTV). Identifying opportunities for upselling and cross-selling is the key to growth and long lasting-relationships.

By understanding market trends and pinpointing the interests or needs of your customers, you can personalize messaging and offerings, reach more underserved customers, and develop new products and services backed by data evidence.

What’s Next?

At Flinks, we leverage data and best-in-class technology to transform businesses. This major expansion of our Enrichment offerings is part of what we do to help you stay proactive with changes, oversight, and trends in the underwriting process for better credit decisioning.

The next version of Segment will incorporate more advanced filter and search capabilities, allowing business users to focus on certain subsets of customers that have specific parameters for more complex analysis. This will be valuable for businesses to produce personalized marketing and direct segmentation lists based on the behaviors and Attributes of their customers.

Get Started

Lenders today have to make good decisions fast while mitigating risks. Segment helps by allowing your teams to craft custom policies, improve loan pricing, and assess risks more accurately.

Ready to give it a go? If you’re a Flinks’ customer, contact your Relationship Manager or Sales Specialist today. If you haven’t had a chance to try out Flinks yet, get a free demo and let us help you get started.