Successful lending relies heavily on having an effective operating model for understanding consumer behaviour and the overarching dynamics of the marketplace. Earlier this decade, TransUnion introduced the concept of the Consumer Finance 3.0 era as our global operating model, driven by regulatory concerns, channel diversification, the emergence of agile and well-funded start-ups, and increasing consumer expectations. That model served us well for a number of years in understanding and responding to the lending marketplace. However, the market continues to evolve, and we believe our model should as well. In this session, we’ll introduce our new operating model — the Consumer First Era — and explain what it means for lenders as the balance of power has shifted to the consumer.

Risk, product and portfolio managers alike are always on the quest for insights as to what in the marketplace drove their performance trends in a specific direction. Benchmarking against industry movements is a critical exercise every lender should perform to identify gaps and opportunities in strategy. However, getting a clear picture of overall industry trends is rarely easy or straightforward. And it's even more challenging to draw a storyline from those trends and then relate that story to business strategy. In this session, we’ll provide a general outlook and commentary on the Canadian economic situation, our perspective on key trends and critical dynamics in the retail and commercial lending marketplaces.

Joint applications are a routine occurrence when originating mortgages and auto loans. Historically, lenders have used a variety of practices when evaluating and pricing these applications, which may result in gaps or inefficiencies when determining risk. In this session, we’ll present best practices for estimating the risk in co-borrower applications. We’ll review a recent study of a pool of co-borrowers and track their performance to assess what behaviours, balance size, alternative data, and/or credit attributes (for one or both individuals) should be considered when quantifying the risk at application, as well as strategies for proactively engaging these consumers early.

Many consumers experience derogatory credit events, but for some consumers, this is a one-time event compared to the norm. After seven years, derogatory information falls off the credit file which invariably impacts consumer credit scores. In this session, we’ll look at how this shift in credit score impacts a consumer’s ability to obtain new credit. We’ll also compare how consumers who had a derogatory event perform on new loans compared to those that did not experience a derogatory event. Also, we’ll evaluate how this performance varies by score shifts and other aspects of the consumer credit profile. Finally, we’ll propose a new model that identifies future prime consumers — those who aren’t yet prime but are predicted to migrate over time — to allow lenders to build specific strategies to maintain and grow this base. Through this study, we’ll look to understand how lenders might capitalize on the potential opportunity to extend credit with confidence to this group of consumers who have derogatory information fall off their file.

Last year in our Summit, we introduced the concept of Global Credit Connect powered by NOVA. During this session, we’ll discuss how this partnership has evolved to help lenders better adjudicate assign limits and onboard new Canadians, and walk you through how it works.

Are consumers who actively monitor their own credit files more attractive to lenders? Consumers are increasingly aware of the importance of strong credit scores in gaining access to new credit and to the best pricing of that credit. They’re now taking a more active role in monitoring and understanding their credit health. But is self-monitoring indicative of improved performance? Are consumers who monitor their credit more active in opening and using new credit products? In this session, we’ll share the findings of a study on consumers who self-monitor their credit, both actively and passively, and present comparisons to consumers who do not self-monitor in terms of loan performance, credit risk improvement, and new product origination and usage.

We’ll provide a high-level strategy and vision for the evolution of our CreditView^SM Dashboard.

There’s been an evolution in the composition of consumer fraud over the last few years, with a shift in the way identity is being used. This session focuses on the evolution of fraud and provides a specific example of the challenges posed by synthetic fraud as a low-volume but high-impact source of losses at financial institutions. We end the session by discussing how TransUnion thinks about identity management differently and how this vision translates into specific strategies for building a more holistic solution for identity management that addresses back-end issues like fraud but also provides an enhanced consumer experience and provides new opportunities for lenders.