Not-for-profit retail lender Fair For You appoints LendingMetrics to implement automated decisions
Fair For You is an award-winning, not-for-profit alternative to weekly payment stores. Consumers purchase items such as white goods and bedroom furniture directly from Fair For You suppliers by taking out a loan with them and repaying in flexible instalments.
Fair For You state that applicants only pay what they can afford, when they can afford it and the faster they pay it off, the less they pay. Fair For You are a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) and members of Social Enterprise UK. They state their product is supported and designed by the consumer and that they are using the power of business to bring about social change.
The approach
LendingMetrics were appointed by Fair For You to implement Auto Decision Platform (ADP) to support them in their plans to significantly grow their loan book. Fair For You had their own in house Credit Risk Officer who designed their decision engine using Call Credit’s core bureau products and also LendingMetrics’ Bank Vision product to collect 90+ days of bank statement data. Their aim was to design a decision engine that could automate as many decisions as possible, delivering good quality leads into the underwriting team so that agent workflow could be driven by tasks from the ADP, based on the warning rules that have been hit and thus improve productivity.
Following several calls between Fair For You and the LendingMetrics project management team, and once the requirements gathering phase had been completed the implementation team took the lead. LendingMetrics took a total of 6 weeks to complete the seamless build of the decision engine in addition to a new CallCredit component which was added to the platform, before passing Fair For You the finished ADP decision engine for acceptance testing.
During the implementation phase Fair For You were also working with the LendingMetrics analytics team to complete a free retro analysis on their LMX (Equifax) products to investigate the possible benefits of adopting a multi-bureau approach and discovering the possible uplift that such a move may provide.
We were excited that this ADP appointment took us into yet another sphere of lending within the retail sector, with ADP now implemented across many different markets.
LendingMetrics are familiar with all aspects of automated decisioning and versed in multi bureau data sources, so they were perfectly placed to help Fair For You look at implementing a multi-bureau approach. They completed the analytics of the Equifax retro, sharing their findings and results and even designing a bespoke scorecard.
Fair For You decided to complete the project in phases, initially implementing their decision engine exclusively with CallCredit data. This facilitated a faster ADP launch with a view to revisiting the multi-bureau model later in 2018.
The result
Fair For You successfully launched and now have a decisioning model which is highly scaleable. ADP was delivered on time and within budget without any upfront fees from LendingMetrics, making the award winning (‘Best Credit Risk Solution’, Credit-Connect Awards 2018) platform a cost-effective solution without compromising on functionality.
Summary
Fair For You have successfully migrated to ADP with minimal business disruption and are now enjoying the benefits of real time credit risk decisioning. Fair For You and LendingMetrics are both looking forward to working together on phase 2 of the project and combining their skill sets.
Neil Williams, Managing Director of LendingMetrics, said: “We were excited that this ADP appointment took us into yet another sphere of lending within the retail sector, with ADP now implemented across many different markets.”
