Today, with a rapidly changing macroeconomic environment, more and more customers have been struggling to repay their loans. This is one of the reasons why it’s been harder than ever to accurately assess applicants’ affordability. The process is even more difficult for customers who are e.g. freelancers or expats. Multiple assessment criteria aren’t always enough to determine whether an applicant can afford to repay the loan.
This is where the Planky tool – Affordability – turns out to be a game changer. The solution enables businesses to verify an applicant’s income and expenditures in seconds, automatically.
What is Affordability?
At Planky, we’ve learned a lot about traditional approaches to credit scoring and affordability checking. The process is extremely inefficient, inaccurate, and costly. Therefore, it may be risky and potentially harmful to both lenders and borrowers. The automated tool changes everything. Affordability is a fast, simple, and effective tool that provides financial companies with instant access to a detailed, holistic view of their customers’ finances and capabilities to afford a loan.
It allows companies to quickly check and analyze income sources, pay cycles, and work histories in just one click. Affordability also makes it possible to break down and analyze customers’ financial behavior at scale, which makes it possible for companies to build much better and customer-friendly financial products. The AI-powered platform provides you with accurate calculations that serve as perfect support for making strategic decisions. The data is accurate and verified as it comes directly from one of the trusted European banks.
Affordability is fully automated, so business owners don’t need any programming skills to integrate it with their products and use it. On top of income and expenditure data, the tool also provides you with important metrics and advanced insights.
How does Affordability work?
The tool is powered by Artificial Intelligence and advanced Machine Learning algorithms. It uses data delivered by the bank and integrates it with your financial product through our API. It enables you to assess an applicant’s affordability in seconds – during the loan application process, the user needs to select and authenticate with their bank. Affordability fetches the raw transactional data and assesses both income sources and expenditures. It also groups transactions into categories such as housing costs, loan payments, utilities (electricity, etc.), transportation costs, and many others.
A great advantage of the tool is that Affordability provides you with real-time financial information. It means that you can rely on current, up-to-date data. You get instant access to income sources and transactions. The data cannot be tampered with because it’s based on underlying transactional data that is updated in real-time.
The tool is not just about the current situation – it also allows you to analyze historical trends, review current months, as well as uncover predictions of what is likely to happen in the near future. The financial information is 100% secure, fully protected, and free of manipulation.
Finally, Affordability can be easily customized according to your business needs. You can decide about income and expenditure category weights – there are predefined categories to use, or you can create your own ones to fully customize the lending procedures that are compliant with your goals and needs. You can check out and test various settings and decide which ones work better for your business.
Affordability – a new way to boost your business
We created Affordability to improve underwriting processes and help lenders and financial institutions make better business decisions. Our tool allows you to:
- Bring your underwriting processes to a new level. You get real-time data directly from the bank so that it’s easy and automatic to verify a customer’s affordability and financial situation.
- Better know your customers. You know your customers’ income sources and the types of transactions they make. It helps you build better, more customer-oriented products. On top of that, you can segment your target audience better and more effectively.
- Provide amazing customer experience by building better products. You can offer a simple, intuitive application experience. Customer satisfaction is increased as users can seamlessly use your services. With Affordability, you can also provide customers with bespoke journeys and tailored messaging – for instance, you can offer customized guidance and advice to users who don’t qualify yet and help them improve their future outcomes.
- Increase revenue. Automation means more efficiency and better precision without human errors. With Affordability, you can accept more applications from customers who are more likely to pay.
- Optimize operational costs and save time. The tool enables you to automate decision-making using data available at your fingertips.
- Improve regulatory compliance and reduce the risk of fraud. It’s easier for you to accurately verify customers’ income sources and regular expenditures in accordance with local and national requirements on affordability assessments. Also, the data is authenticated and manipulation-free so there is no risk of fraudulent activity.
Ready to book a demo?
Affordability is currently one of the most intuitive and efficient tools designed for income and expense verification. It has already helped dozens of businesses improve their affordability assessments using real-time data confirmed by banks. If you want to quickly integrate the platform with your product, do not hesitate to reach out!
