Proactive data for Collections – [FULL INTERVIEW]

In this full interview, Stuart Murgatroyd from Data On Demand discusses the data environment in collections and the use of new data sources to proactively identify and understand customer behaviour. In areas such as identifying customer vulnerability (linking to the FCA’s customers financial lives survey and consumer duty) this is all proving to become increasingly important.

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Interview Transcript

0:03
So hi, everyone. I’m here with Stuart Murgatroyd. Here today, he’s the CEO of data on demand. Stuart, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. Stewart, you want to start, you want to tell us a little bit about data and demand? And what you guys do? I think that’s a good place to at least kick off.

0:21
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So we provide data and insights to companies that service consumers, better helping them understand those people. We’ve got two products, Fin trace, which is for collections and recoveries, and a product called ID view for identifying vulnerability

0:37
in your in the data space, and sort of collecting lots lots of information from different sources, and then providing that back to back to clients. What are some of the things you’re seeing in terms of changes in terms of what clients are asking for and how that data is, would have been gathered and then being ingested?

0:53
Yeah. I mean, we we’re not reinventing the wheel. And this isn’t rocket science. Where we’re different from the other kind of incumbent traditional providers, like the CRS is that we’re sourcing different types of data. In particular, we have relationships with a number of high cost short term lenders and affiliates that drive traffic into those particular what used to be called Pink trees. But that’s, that’s not a word that people like to use anymore, but it’s still the same thing. You’re trying to find the lender that will lend to the individual who, who requires the loan. So in terms of what a client is looking for, they’re looking to be able to either contact more people for collections and recoveries, or identify people who are currently vulnerable. And those are really the the main asks at the moment from from our clients. What we’re seeing, though, in terms of the change in the data is the insights that are available to us, and then available to our customer. So it goes beyond just contact information. It goes deeper now being able to take information from loan applications, that is information that is seen before it goes to a credit reference agency that gives you lots of insights around a person’s financial behaviour. And before it gets to a credit reference agency, because rating agencies application data,

2:18
about we had a conversation before around financial vulnerability and sort of using data to be able to determine some of that I thought that’s quite interesting, particularly going into the digital world is is like we’re looking for ways to almost like get to customers quicker, who might be in difficult to talk to offer support. I mean, what’s what’s what’s been your sort of insight around that? Because that’s always been a challenge in terms of trying to go back and have getting people on the phone?

2:41
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a challenge. And it’s certainly a hot topic at the moment. And I think now we’ve had the guidance on the vulnerability that’s come out, we’ve had the financial life survey that was finalised. And what people are really waiting for now is the final version of the consumer duty, the new consumer duty, which I think here’s where people will then start to companies, firms will start to act more. At the moment, they do lots of research and looking at what are the other ways that we can find identifiable vulnerable customers outside of the traditional data sources, which really is just the CRA s. Although you do have the VRS the vulnerability registration service, who we partner with, and that’s a great a pot of data around about a half a million people, they’ve got self declared vulnerable individuals. What we bring to the table that Sir, there’s different Is there a high cost short term low debt loan data that creates our IDV product. And it’s 2.5 million individuals on there that have taken high cost short term loans. It’s a very new product, we only started building the database in July 2020. And over that period of however many months that is less than two years, we’ve seen 2.5 million people apply for loans. But the interesting thing is that every month, we see around about 500 to 800,000 applications. And of those applications is 50,000 to 80,000 that are brand new never seen before. So you’ve got the same people coming in again and again and again and again. And these are vulnerable people. The FCA in the financial life survey they they they created the characteristics of vulnerability, which are bereavement income, shock, lower attic income, caring relationship breakdown over indebtedness and low savings. And what we’ve been able to do is take those characteristics and use the data we’ve got in our ID view database to actually map those back to an individual level. So some interesting statistics from last month. From the data that we’ve got on the database. We saw 16,104 people who needed to borrow short term cash that was the purpose of their loan. We saw 37,981 people who needed to borrow money from a hiker slender to pay the household bills that month. Now, 37,981 might not sound like an enormous number, but if you’re British Gas, and you want to match that back to your customer base and just identify a handful of customers, that’s people you can help.

5:16
Yeah. And I suppose just looking at the affordability crisis, I suppose, which was talked about really at the start of the year. Yeah. And we were just chatting at the start there about how it, you know, energy prices, even just recently, I mean, that they’ve even exploding further lines, because there’s still more to go on that. I mean, I imagine there’s, there’s insight there in terms of that population could could grow further. And I suppose it comes back to the efficiencies in terms of how you work in those accounts, how you’re helping those customers?

5:40
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what will be interesting for us to see is this, if there is a spike in people borrowing money to pay their bills, because we’ve got the history of the information over the past from the past few years, then we’ll be able to spot those trends, actually, in terms of the growth in applications for those reasons. And I think the energy crisis, I am waiting for my direct debit to go up. It hasn’t yet, but it’s around about the 18th that the bill goes up. So I’m interested to see in the next few days, how much they actually hike that up. This problem is really the the BBC article out the other day actually about everything that’s going on at the moment in terms of the consumer credit crisis, that that is happening on the back of Ukraine and the back of the pandemic. And it’s the low it’s the middle income to low income families that are certainly going to suffer from this. We talked about we did we did a piece actually we did a seminar, but the CSA, probably six months ago, about the tsunami of debt that we expected to see as a result of the pandemic. And I’d published something on LinkedIn a few days ago, we just haven’t seen that. We haven’t seen that that wave, if you like of, of debt, yet.

6:59
It was almost like through COVID. I mean, a lot of us were expecting the tsunami of data. And it was sort of you know, is when we all work in collections, we sort of like we’re we’re looking out for it right at Yeah. And it really didn’t come through I suppose because of the you know, the government support and some of the things it is almost like, I suppose I mean, do you think we’ve got a bit of a fear that almost like there was a bit of almost like crying wolf for first time, just in the general perception that now we see this coming through? And I, I would agree, I think there’s a risk that the people going to take their eye off the ball. I mean, before all this, I mean, there’s definitely a little bit of sort of opening the books to try and get more lending through, I think, on the front end. You got your thoughts on that? Or do you think do you think we’re gonna be ready?

7:39
Well, I think you look back at what the government did in this the two main things, which is furlough and forbearance. So, you know, people, businesses were able to pay people without them having to go to work. And people were able not to have to pay back debts, and they had breaks, which is great. And it allowed a lot of people to, to catch up and get back on top. Avoid that massive amount of debt. But moving forwards, we’re entering a different kind of crisis. Now. We see food inflation at the highest rate, it’s been since September 2013. I read on the BBC website, there’s other things that you don’t think about that will have an effect, the rising price of secondhand cars, it’s going to create a bubble a bit like the housing crisis, the housing crash the dead, because you’ve got people who are buying cars now that 25% above market value current, or pre market, pre market value, pre pandemic and pre the shortage of the supply of those vehicles, those people have financing those vehicles, not everyone buys the car out, right? See now financing a vehicle that’s 25% above market value. And actually, you’ve probably got that financed for three to five years, in three to five years, the production will will find its feet again. And the price of those secondhand cars will reduce. People are going to be left with cars that they’ve got massive amounts of negative equity and there’s things like this that we don’t think about that are result of the pandemic and moving forward through that. So yeah, I think

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9:18
I’ll be like a double whammy, you got like a double whammy, you got a double whammy you pay more for it. And then it’s it’s then gone down in value with income to sell it so you’re like you lose on both ends.

9:27
Certainly at the moment people second on how cars going up in votes is great if you sell it now, but he’s still in it’s like chicken and egg of well if I sell it at a higher price, go buy one at a higher price and, you know, like like housing prices that moment and will that be a similar thing? You know, housing prices have increased massively. We had the the Help to Buy but also the stamp duty reduction as well. There was a surge of people buying houses and actually money’s cheap at the moment. borrowing money from high street lenders that 1% 1.5% 2% It’s it’s a great time had to borrow money. But people are only fixing those deals for kind of two to five years, there’s not many people are fixing them beyond that period. Again, what happens then if interest rates do go up, and you’ve pushed yourself to borrow more than? Well, you could afford it at a time maybe. But if you’re, if the if the interest rates go up for your mortgage, if the prices go up, if energy bills go up, all of a sudden, now you’re trying to finance a car that’s not worth the value. It should be then.

10:28
And you’re starting to see any of that stress in your data now, or is it still sort of relatively benign? Because I think it’s fair to say it’s, but it’s been relatively benign, I think, much more than we expected for sure, over the last sort of 18 months, and we didn’t we did sort of see that but some indications around are we starting to see that return to normal or even starting to increase? If you’ve got any indications for that yet, or we’re still in the wait and see mode, do you think,

10:51
the wait and see mode, I mean, we’ve done some work recently with a car finance provider with a small book of 10,000 customers, but over huge value of actually money that’s been lent. And the IDV product is, is great, because what they they gave us lots of data and gave us the information about how much the how much each person had borrowed. So we’re able to then categorise that into certain bandings. Also, they’re telling us who the good players are right down. So you’ve got, you’ve got currently paying good customers, all the way down to them one to 12 payments behind. What was really interesting for us to show to go to that to the car finance company was, you’ve got your good payers, but actually, we’ve identified a small proportion. Who are, we were categorised as highly vulnerable. They’ve lost a job, they’ve reduced their income, they’ve suffered a relationship breakdown or bereavement. And these are people that the FCA would classify us as highly vulnerable people, they’re even more people that looked like they were vulnerable. So the, it’s what you were talking about, it’s, it’s being able to identify those individuals to take action before. They can’t afford to pay the repayments anymore and service those loans. So it’s, it’s using the information we’ve got right now before it’s too late.

12:16
Anyway, and operationally, how does that sort of translate into action? Do they sort of use that as almost like also, that pre arrears conversation almost like, it’s like, we’ve got some information that can actually be helpful in sort of like heading off some of these issues? Is it sort of like providing those nuggets from a, you know, almost like a pre delinquency pre arrears type type information to set them up? And then, you know, have the conversation is that typically how you’ve seen it being used.

12:41
There’s three reasons why people want to use this data, an attorney to using data, when it’s the credit risk element of it, and the credit risk director wants to know, how many of these people who are currently paying do we think will will not be able to pay from the information we can get that isn’t coming after the event after a missed payment after a CCJ. This is saying, right here, right now we know this person has applied for a high cost short term loan, they can’t get financed for what they need anywhere else, there’s a credit risk decisioning of your current portfolio of customers, then you’ve got your compliance person who wants to make sure that they meet their obligations to the regulator, he’s saying, You need to find more vulnerable people, you need to identify them and put them into action. And then you’ve got the vulnerable customer manager. And they kind of the whole ethical side of it of you, you should be providing better outcomes for your customers. So it’s, it’s all about using the information for credit risk, regulatory obligations, also creating better outcomes for those customers.

13:36
Maybe just talk a little bit about suppose GDPR, and privacy and those kind of things into the like how this is sort of like covered by that. And it’s like, yeah, in terms of the data processing piece.

13:48
Yeah. So that’s interesting, actually. So what we’ve we, from the very, very start from the outset, we wanted to ensure that we were absolutely compliant in terms of GDPR. And you’ve got to give the individual a notification at the point of data submission, about what you’ll be doing with their data, the fair process or notice, which is some wording, which explains to the consumer, what’s going to happen to their data. And then it’ll be linked to a privacy policy with a lot more information in that privacy policy. So what we did when we started off building out ID view and fin tracer collections products, we made sure that in every website that contributes to our product, then we are there’s wording that we have in the fair processing. Notice data on demand is hyperlinked there, as well as also a hyperlink to the privacy policy. And importantly, the individual has a hyperlink to be able to opt out at that point as well. It’s really important that you give the individual the opportunity to opt out of the processing. Privacy Policy explains very clearly why we use the data and for what purposes and yeah, the individual is notified at that at that point. It’s a bit like tracking back the meat in a supermarket where you know where your steak came from. You pick it off the shelf and you go it came from a farm in Norfolk on The seventh eighth of November. Exactly the same with us. If someone, if a customer or a consumer data subject says, Where did you get this information from? Then we can track right back to the origination. Submission. Yeah, which is great. It’s it’s really good. So it’s, it’s compliant. But the other thing is that we’re only working with companies and we’re only building products that create better outcomes for customers. The data collection product means that, although people see debt collection, it’s a dirty word debt collection, it’s a horrible, you shouldn’t be collecting debts, actually, the better outcome from the customer is that that person that’s got a big pile of debt here, but it’s gonna be purchased by someone else, they’re going to spread that cost out, potentially reduce it, and they’re going to ease that person’s financial struggle, which is great. With the vulnerability stuff, then, again, you know, you’re you’re identifying someone who is currently vulnerable, you’re giving information back to a service provider to say, you can help this customer not only can you protect your own business with credit risk, and you can do what you need to do for regulator, but you can do it you should do as a as a business provide better outcomes. So yeah, yeah. So the day the dates that you’ve got to be compliant with the data that you supply.

16:12
So you talk to me about your Christmas current data sources, and you’re getting it too late. So it’s loan applications and some sort of tax, transparent process. But do you see there’s other sources of data where you could get information that could also be useful? And is that sort of like a, an area where you think we’re going to see expansion?

16:28
Yeah, I mean, I think call credit credit, I was calling credits TransUnion. When I worked there, it was called credit. TransUnion, for example, recently announced that they’re taking in a lot of the Buy Now pay later data, which I think will be really useful. So that’s another source of data that that’s out there that will will certainly be useful for collections and for vulnerability

16:53
wasn’t also things like Netflix subscriptions and some of your subscription services as well, that I think was also being ingested.

16:58
We’re not doing any Netflix stuff for me, you could, you could take that in for kind of information. But what there’s, there’s got to be a certain level of expectation from the consumer that the data will be used for the purposes, and also needs to be a notification at the point of data submission or data entry for the purposes of the processing. So actually, we, anyone, well, anyone could take any data from anywhere, as long as the correct permissions were in place to use it for other purposes. So we’ve got a huge database. At the moment, there are 25 million addresses 35 million confirmed individuals, that’s 25 million mobile numbers, 31 million email addresses 60 million landlines. So I’ve just got it down there can never remember the numbers, they change, always going up, but they change.

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17:47
So it’s quite sure of you, as we sort of amass the data on on, you know, potential customer databases. I mean, how far do you think you can go in terms of automating and being purely digital versus the role of the human in terms of gathering some of the information, you’re obviously gathering information digitally, sort of sitting in your database, but there’s also within operations, obviously, that’s a data gathering exercise as well. And where do you sort of see the, the balance or the almost like the the symbiosis, I suppose, of the working together of like that the digital and the human.

18:18
So I think you’re always going to need the human touch with debt collection and vulnerability, at some point, somebody’s going to need to speak to somebody, where I think that the connection comes in, it’s actually creating the contact, creating the engagement with the individual. So if you’re, if you’ve only got postal information, and the person that you want to contact isn’t opening letters, then you’re hitting a brick wall. But if you can provide them, if you can append a mobile number or an email address, and they get a text message, and they can open that, and it takes them to a landing page that tells them a bit more, it’s personalised, it’s explaining to that individual about how the service provider could help them, then that would certainly be useful. I think, for vulnerability as well. It’s, there’s a lot of a lot of people have written about this. And, and a lot of people will agree that a lot of people will not admit or think or want to admit they’re vulnerable. The data identifies the fact that they are, or they could be or they’re emerging as vulnerable. So actually been able then to take that digital information from application and add an SMS and send a text message to that person to say, we can help you, this is what we can do for you, then that would potentially create more engagement. So I think that’s the it’s the connection between you can’t have a digital proposition without having a digital contact channel.

19:52
But what I find quite interesting is almost like you have those direct indicators around vulnerability, but then you also have direct indirect indicators, you know, they might be too Three steps removed, but they’re also predictive as well. And, you know, what does what does that mean in terms of vulnerability or potential vulnerability, and you know that someone might be presented vulnerable, I would say, and sort of starting to build that up. And that feels like we’re almost like starting on that journey. As much as you know, here it here’s the flag over here is the action. It’s almost like this might be true. So let’s, let’s flag it, and then find out and get the extra information. And that’s Furth.

20:27
I think that’s fair. And I think that’s fair, because they know, it’s especially talking about the the FCA for the regulator for financial services, then they’ve done this flagship flagship survey for their financial lives, and they’ve come up with the characteristics of vulnerability. That was an incredibly expensive survey and incredibly in depth survey with incredible reference points and a great survey in terms of identifying those characters with vulnerability, being able then to to map those back to your individual customers, then, yeah, we’re not, we’re not saying that it’s an indicator, Chris, just like you said, it’s this person. The FCA have said that someone who has an income shock is someone that has lost a job in the last 12 months, if we can tell you that someone had reduced working hours or lost their job, they went from employed to unemployed in their loan applications, in the last three weeks. That’s the time to actually talk to that person, not having that information, and not being able to speak to that person, at that point, to understand their current situation, means you missed that opportunity. And it’s not until the credit reference agency, six months, 12 months down the line, report the CCJ, or the IRS, or the person stops paying, and you pass it on to a debt purchaser, you’ve lost the opportunity to, to do the three things we talked about, which is reducing that credit risk obligations to the regulator and getting the better out from that customer. At the point of understanding, and an application for a short term loan, high cost loan really is a cry for help. So I’m putting a hand up saying I can’t get finance, at a decent rate, no mainstream lenders will lend to me, I haven’t got enough savings to pay this bill. I haven’t got friends or family who can lend me this money. But I need I need some help. And I need it because I need 100 quid to pay my gas bill. It’s a really great indicator of someone’s emerging vulnerability.

22:22
And I suppose what about the work environment and the business environment and how you sort of like seeing that change? I mean, obviously, we talked about 2020, we’ve been in sort of like this sort of hybrid sort of like lockdown versus in the office versus, you know, alpha conferences versus doing things remotely, I mean, have you sort of seen that change and what you sort of think’s going to happen going forward.

22:42
It’s interesting, actually, our office is in a city centre of late above the train station. So it couldn’t be any more central. I drive into Leeds, and it’s about it’s about 770 miles into Leeds, from where I am. So I’m a little bit further north, and I go into Leeds. And typically, if I left home, half our state to get to the office, that would take me an hour and 15 minutes, I can be sat at my desk in 25 minutes now, certainly not as many people going into, into offices as they were before. And you can stand at the window of our office and look at the onto the front of the train station. And it’s it’s not busy. There’s not as many people there as, as they used to be. So certainly, certainly quieter. I spent a lot more time working from home now than I added before. But yeah, it’s we’re not nothing’s back to normal. The Russia and Ukraine war at the moment, is going to make things take longer to get back to normal as well. Yeah, the sentiment that’s out there is still, you know, one of nervousness and you look at the stock market and everything that’s happening now as well, you know, we’re, we’re still on a shaky ground. Really, it’s gonna take a while for them to get back to normal. And I don’t think that life in the office will ever, ever be the same as

24:06
I was in London, the other week, and I was definitely noticing, definitely a Friday low. I mean, if I just I just compare it to where it was sort of like, three years ago, I mean, I used to have trouble parking and had to get there really early to get a parking spot. And these days, you till you get there quickly, you can get a parking spots hiding on the train. And I didn’t know if that was just a Friday thing versus you know, people sort of like working from home at that Friday and maybe Monday, versus versus like a wider kind of shift. Well, I’m just lazy to get in.

24:38
I’m on a train to London on Tuesday, my first trip to London in a while so I’ll let you know if it’s any different on a Tuesday to Friday, but you certainly see in the office in Leeds, Mondays and Fridays, are quieter days. Yeah, that’s definitely the working from home days

24:52
for people. And I suppose the question is, does it matter? Right, so So for us, does it really matter? I mean, I’m not sure how much it does. I mean, When we’re doing this via video, I mean, do you find that clients are much more receptive to it. And the other thing I’ve noticed is meetings become smaller as well shorter, you can bounce from ones,

25:10
you can get up, you can get more people, I’ve had more virtual meetings where more people are available on those calls, it’s, it’s easier to get everyone on a video call and it is to get everyone to Nottingham. If that’s where you’re meeting people, so that’s certainly been interesting for a new business like ours in a startup, really, then taking out the cost of attending meetings is useful. Because rather than the trip to London for one day that, you know, can be expensive, you’ve got three people on a call, it takes half an hour, like you said, I think, I don’t know if it slows the whole process down a little bit. You are whether you get more attention or buying from someone when you when you meet them face to face and agree things. It’s difficult to say whether that is a result of face to face versus virtual or just a result of the markets slower than it’s ever been. Because we’re still coming out with the pandemic and you look at the debt collection business that debt purchasers, there’s not as much debt for sale, they’re not buying as much debt, the banks are more nervous in selling it. So, you know, there’s there’s a knock on effect in terms of things perhaps being a little bit slower. And how and how long they contracts it taking to come to to fruition?

26:30
Yeah, it definitely feels like almost like you. Whereas before you meet people build the relationship. And then then then you do the business. It’s almost like it’s like, build the relationship online first. And these sort of reinforce it, I suppose by meeting by meeting face to face.

26:45
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, yeah, it’s always great to get a face to face after that. It’s almost like a first date. You know, you do the first day and it did it go alright, or not? Can you move on to a second date, face to face? Which is interesting. But I think what’s interesting about the whole virtual thing is, if I went back to February 2020, and I’d spoken to a client send an email to a client, so they’ve got something really interesting that you we should talk about. And they said, Yeah, and I said, let’s set up a video call. If you could get your UPS director and your your collections manager onto a virtual video call. What do you think? I think they would have gotten? No, I don’t think so. Up to the office. hour off. Yeah. So people are more accepting.

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27:35
It didn’t feel like it. Just feel like it’s improved the speed of things in which you wish things could be turned around. Although I do have a bit of a sense that it’s subtly changing a little bit really, since the start of this year, we sort of like it’s and people have sort of struggled a little bit between in office meetings where you had in office meetings versus virtual meetings, and it’s been a little bit it’s like the time pressure, you can feel the sort of the time pressure changing and all that.

27:57
Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, I would agree with that. Our, our technical guys who have loved this period of time, because they just love working at home, only only coming into the office once a month is a dream come true for those guys. But I like being in the office, we’ve got, we recently created a couple of new business development executives who are booking appointments and speaking to prospective clients. They’re in the office every day. But then they’re only during their early 20s. And they don’t want to be sat at home, they want to be in the office, they want to be in the city centre, you know, they want to go out at lunchtime and have a walk, get some food and meet their girlfriends after work and go to the bar and that kind of stuff. They want to be sat at home

28:37
sweated? Where do you think we go from here though, with all the talk about data and sort of expansion of data, the stuff that you’ve been doing in terms of like using data really to sort of inform processes, I think, and then for inform inform actions on customers. But But where do you think it goes from here? I mean, what’s what’s the what’s what’s the future look like? If data has been talked about everywhere, but what’s next.

29:01
But I think we’ve got to change the future. And I think we change the future by introducing data that isn’t currently available, and finding new sources of data that perform better, that give better outcomes not only for the debt collectors and the people who are looking for the vulnerable customers to satisfy their their own needs, but also to create those better outcomes for the customers as well. Think what you’ve got is you’ve got three incumbents CRA who’ve dominated this space for a long, long time. And people who use those businesses, they’re great. I used to work for one, they’re fantastic businesses, they do a very good job of what they do. But changing the future is about identifying other companies with different data sources that can bring something new to the table. Something something interesting. We we were I won’t name names, but we were we got to the final of becoming a FinTech partner for a large organisation that run these kind of cohort programmes and The reason we didn’t actually get onto the programme was the other product works innovative on their product was actually showing a huge increase in potential success and potential revenue gains. It wasn’t sexy enough for them, because here’s what she said to me. We’re looking for open banking, we’re looking for API’s, we’re looking for the answers. One is great. But this actually, this is a really innovative product, because we’ve got API’s API’s, but the innovation is actually collecting the data from new sources, putting it into the processes to enable people to use it in debt collection might not sound sexy, but actually, you know, look, if you look at the uptake in open banking, it sounds sexy, sounds great, Hey, open banking, you know, digital, you’ll be able to get information from people’s bank accounts. Well, we all know, the adoption of that has been terrible. And actually, the uptake of the consumer the trust they want to give to someone else to access their bank account hasn’t happened. So changing the future really is about changing the mindset of the organisations that are currently using certain data sources, from the CRA s and saying, I open banking sounds great, guys, but it’s not going to get you the incident result that you’re gonna get from us by identifying someone who’s been online yesterday, I said, I lost my job and 800 pounds per my gas bill. That’s more powerful information that the open banking places that people don’t really pick up,

31:21
did you not think often with that new technology comes in, there’s usually a lead time between almost like the hype that’s talked about, so it’s like something new is being introduced, and then the the use case and the case studies, and there’s a gap between the two, and it takes a while for it to sort of bleed through on I do think there’s been a bit of that with a banking, you could certainly see that with the dot coms, you know, video on demand buying your books online, when that first came out, it took a while. But now we do it every day. It just takes time for some of these things to come through was I think what you’re saying about what you’re doing is the infrastructures there, it’s about new data sources, you can plug in to use some of the existing processes the flag it.

31:59
Yeah, absolutely. And for the faint for the collections product, that’s exactly what it’s there. There’s there’s new data sources that are gonna show an instant uplift and improve performance. However, with the IDV product, we’re certainly at that stage that you’re talking about there, which is use case versus hype. Because it’s still hype around vulnerability, that no one’s taking any action. Yeah, that’s significant. And then a regulator to say, well, you’re gonna get fined, or you’re gonna have to do this because you haven’t done what we said you had to do. So I do think that there’s that gap between use case and hype at the moment. But that will take a little bit of time to, to come to fruition. But

32:37
yeah, I suppose with the consumer duty coming in, next year, right. So it’ll be that’s, that’s where I’m sort of getting ready now to make sure you got your ducks in order now to get ready for that.

32:47
Yeah, the catalysts, I think there’ll be a rush for the IDV product, because the catalyst will be when the consumer duty actually gets finalised and comes into place where you’re right about, you know, you think Netflix, I’m never gonna watch movies online. Bank, I remember using online banking and never using online banking. So I’m not gonna put my credit card details in there. Yeah, now I’m Apple Pay, I just touch things. And they take my money

33:16
when Netflix used to deliver DVDs to your door, so that was it, wasn’t it?

33:19
Yeah. Yes. Right. Never take off streaming movies online. Because you could do it at the time, but you could stream things it was a real is real hassle to actually stream things. And yeah, but like you say, as as a difference with the open banking is it’s winning over the trust of the individual consumers, that nothing’s gonna happen to that data. The other thing I think with, I mean, there’s a, there’s a similarity actually, between using open banking and admitting you’re vulnerable, because as a consumer, you’re worried about the outcome. So using open banking, as a consumer, you’re saying, right, I’m going to give you access to absolutely everything. And you’re going to make a decision based on that. And I’ve given you it, it’s open now. I, you know, if you go for a mortgage, you might be able to send the bank statement, you want to send and, you know, not not necessarily give access to absolutely everything, then with the vulnerability piece as well. Customers don’t want to necessarily admit they’re vulnerable, because they think they’re going to get charged more, they won’t get the finance, they’re going to get higher interest rate applied to their loan, actually, we’re actually it’s the opposite duty of the provider is to make sure it’s a better outcome, not a worse outcome for them. So, so it’s so far from banking, it’s winning the consumer. I think that’s the key to that success. But for us, we we don’t need to win over any consumers. They’ve shared their data with us, we’ve got it and it’s there for for our customers to be able to use immediately to create those better outcomes

34:46
and better outcomes as it sort of flows through the process. Well, Stuart, thank you. Thank you very much for for making the time I really appreciate it as always great insight and some some really interesting nuance and and some developments I think really arounds like just areas of data to be able to sort of provide extra insight for consumers and for customers really so Stuart Thank you very much

35:10
yeah thanks Chris great to speak to you


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