Financial Services Companies Can Leverage Rich Data Sets to Minimize Lending Risk Through GDS Link’s Customizable, Scalable Solutions

In a Nutshell: In today’s rapid-paced finance industry, lenders must be able to quickly and accurately assess a customer’s credit risk. GDS Link offers customizable and scalable solutions that allow lenders to seamlessly integrate credit risk strategies into their existing infrastructures. The company’s core platform, DataView360®, offers a convenient way for customers to implement risk strategies and continue to evaluate accounts over the entire account lifecycle. GDS Link gathers user feedback to help guide product developments, including moving toward more automated processes to help streamline clients’ credit risk strategies.

One of the most crucial steps on the path to lending money is assessing credit risk.

A poor assessment can not only result in the lender losing money, but a consumer or business could be unduly granted a large loan they may not be able to repay, which can land them in dire financial circumstances.

Maintaining an up-to-date and fair strategy to manage credit risks benefits both businesses and consumers.

GDS Link provides today’s lenders with modern tools to manage credit risk through its technology solutions and its analytical and consulting services.

The company was founded in 2006 by former Scorex executives Paul Greenwood and Yves Duhoux after identifying numerous problems within the credit risk lending community, including inefficiencies, unnecessary complexity, and other gaps in the system.

“There was a lot of wasted time and effort that went into implementing scoring models and they set out to create a solution for easier, more efficient integration,” said Rich Alterman, Executive Vice President of Business Development at GDS Link.

Alterman said within the lending industry today, it is not uncommon for companies to rely on generic, or canned, credit score services. This can be a disservice to the business and to the consumer.

When Greenwood and Duhoux decided to create GDS Link, they wanted to build a company that prioritized authentic personal relationships with their clients. They also wanted to streamline practices within the industry while offering flexible solutions.

The company’s core platform, DataView360®, does just that by facilitating the rapid implementation of credit risk strategies for clients across multiple financial verticals.

GDS Link’s core platform, DataView360®, helps clients across multiple financial verticals rapidly implement credit risk strategies.

“The DataView360® application can be customized to deliver a complete solution or enhance existing applications with the necessary elements,” according to the company website. “By being highly attentive to our clients’ needs and leveraging our own industry-leading knowledge and experience, GDS Link delivers exceptional value and an enhanced customer experience.”

Alterman said the company’s data bureau gateway facilitates access to numerous third-party data sources to assist in fraud prevention, risk assessment, and income and employment verification. GDS Link also offers a workflow component for scenarios that require manual intervention by the client.

Overall, GDS Link helps lenders quickly aggregate data that is relevant for potential loans, process large quantities of data, identify trends, deliver actionable results, simplify the decision-making process, and integrate decision engine tools in the digital lending process.

“For over 10 years we have helped thousands of lending institutions and diverse organizations around the globe achieve higher growth while successfully managing risk,” according to GDS Link. “Rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, our industry-specific risk management insights help guide the development and implementation of solutions tailored to individual needs.”

Because of the flexible designs of GDS Link’s products, clients are not required to completely overhaul their existing infrastructures. The company’s solutions are scalable to meet the client’s specific needs.

Alterman said GDS Link’s initial focus was on assessing credit risk in the origination phase, but in recent years the company has expanded its focus to bring value to the entire lifecycle of a customer.

“We’re challenging our existing clients as well as looking at how we target new customers around that full customer lifecycle,” he said. “We’re now starting to have a lot of dialogue with our clients about how they can leverage, for example, our rules engine in collections.”

Rich Alterman is the Executive Vice President of Business Development at GDS Link.

He said that, if a client offers a revolving credit product, the client can continue to monitor the customer account over the account lifecycle. The client can then potentially assign a behavioral score, decrease credit limits, increase credit limits, or implement a collections strategy.

Alterman illustrated how GDS Link’s analytics can aid clients in the collections phase.

“If I have five accounts in front of me that are all 90 days past due, and they all owe me $10,000, without having any other data, I would treat each one of those accounts exactly the same,” he said. “But if I can layer on analytics and data sources on top of that, both internal and external, then all of a sudden those five accounts look different, and based on how they look, I can take different actions.”

He said once a client accesses this data, the client can choose the most effective action to take with each account. The client may send a text message to one past due account, send a letter for another past due account, take no action for another, and place another account with a collections agency.

“Rather than offering that collections software itself, we provide that tool to help you better stratify those accounts,” he said. “We’re really focusing heavily on coming into the market at a different angle besides origination, where our software has value in other functional areas within a business entity.”

He said this lifecycle perspective is another key component of the company’s DataView360® platform.

GDS Link values client feedback to help guide product development, Alterman said.

“As far as how we evaluate our clients’ satisfaction, we do have a Net Promoter Score,” Alterman said. “We also hired a third-party company to do a customer survey, which we will conduct annually. We came out with an extremely high score of 65, which is about 40 points higher than the norm so we were very pleased with those results.”

He said GDS Link also does quarterly business reviews with its clients to get feedback on where the client’s business is heading and how GDS Link can continue to best serve its needs.

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“One of the key themes that you hear from these lenders is the term ‘time-to-fund,’ or how quickly they are able to bring in an application and ultimately deliver capital into the customer’s hands,” Alterman said. “They’re all fighting to do that more quickly, and that’s all about automation.”

He said GDS Link’s software can generate ROI for clients around efficiencies and gains in productivity they get from moving a manual process to an automated process.

“In the small business lending arena, you tend to see more manual steps than, let’s say, in the consumer lending side of the business,” Alterman said. “But they’re all being driven to do more with less, to do it more efficiently, smarter, to look at all the data sources that are available, and once again, with a goal of constantly finding ways to reduce that time to fund.”

In today’s world of increasingly automated processes and digital transactions, being able to quickly and accurately assess a customer’s credit risk is key for lenders. GDS Link is helping to keep clients up to speed with its flexible, scalable, and effective credit risk strategy solutions.