By Benjamin Balk, SAI Global General Manager, Product and Marketing,
October 3, 2015
AUSTRALIA'S BANKS AND financial institutions provide more than $650 billion in commercial credit to the market. The majority of their commercial loan decisions rely on company and securities checks which provide insights into a business's ability to manage debt.
Launched this year, the report is part of SAI Global's rapidly expanding stable of “commercial insights” solutions. It has been integrated with the company's commercial insights platforms, Search Manager and Encompass.
In financial institutions, these processes typically involve commercial credit teams painstakingly trawling through hundreds of pages of government extracts and performing separate searches of data bases such as those of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR) and others. And once done, interpreting the data and developing a summary of the results.
Decisions about whether or not to approve credit applications are often based on these findings, which despite the best efforts can be subjective, prone to error and overlook vital information tucked away in difficult to read reports, particularly in relation to commercial lending.
Lost opportunities
The fallout from this is that loans can be granted without the lender seeing the full picture. For financial institutions, this can mean accruing unnecessary bad debts and can result in lost opportunities thanks to time wasted on prolonged data reviews.
In a highly competitive market and with increasing compliance obligations, making the right decision fast has never been more important.
SAI Global's new Dynamic Company and Securities Report (DCSR) is radically reducing the risk of human error and improving back office efficiencies by doing much of the “heavy-lifting” in assessing and processing commercial loan applications.
DCSR to the rescue
The new report does the hard work by analysing the key data from ASIC, Australian Business Research (ABR) and PPSR searches and presenting the results in a concise upfront summary report.
This allows lending teams across the financial institution to quickly confirm details about companies and their directors, their assets and other individuals or entities involved in a deal.
It also highlights areas of potential credit risk when used at the point of credit application.
This greatly reduces the errors that come with manually sourcing and interpreting data because information is provided as a “statement of fact” from government sourced data and there is no need for subjective interpretation.
Faster time to “yes”
This not only allows for better decision-making and the opportunity to identity key risks or blockers to a commercial loan application early on - ahead of ordering credit information - but also has the potential to reduce processing time and help with a faster time to a “yes” decisions in order to get customers off the market.
Initial results from a trial underway of the report in a major Australian bank has revealed an 80 per cent reduction in human effort required to order, interpret and assess ASIC, ABR and PPSR data, resulting in fewer errors in data interpretation by staff and loan decisions being made in a much shorter timeframe.