Telco data is the information available with telecommunications companies about their customers’ usage of their services, such as calls, text messages, internet usage, prepaid top-up information and location information. Such telco data if accessed by financial service providers, can provide them with valuable insights into the usage patterns and behaviour of their customers to make smarter lending decisions.
Given the growing penetration of mobile phones across Indonesia, telco data of the unbanked and underbanked could help financial service providers underwrite them, allowing them to expand their reach. Such an unbanked population could hence stand a chance to gain access to credit by sharing their telco data with financial service providers for underwriting them. In Indonesia itself, there are over 200 million active mobile phone users that generate an enormous amount of telco data that is available for financial service providers to leverage for smarter underwriting and improved loan collections.
How does Telco data help make smarter lending decisions?
Telco data shares information about a customer’s usage patterns, usage behaviour, location, prepaid top-up amount, platforms linked with their mobile number and more. The insights from such information can be leveraged by financial service providers to lend smarter in the following ways:
1. Phone number details: Details such as the tenure of the number, activation date etc can help financial service providers track frequent changes in such information to prevent fraud.
2. Top-up data for prepaid users: The prepaid top-up information such as the top-up amount and the frequency of top-ups can help gain an overview of the customer’s spending and usage patterns. This can help financial service providers with the underwriting process.
3. Connections information: Get information about the different accounts linked to the customer’s phone number such as social accounts, e-commerce platforms, email addresses, messaging apps and others. Such information helps understand the possibility of the number being a primary or secondary number. The higher the number of connections made with a given phone number, the greater the likeliness of the phone number being a primary number. This is based on the presumption that such a number will be a hassle for the user to dispose of and can thus be effectively used to reach the customer for loan-related communications like collections etc.
Financial service providers can leverage their customer’s telco data for making smarter decisions across the loan lifecycle right from onboarding to collections while enhancing risk assessment and preventing possible fraud. This not only helps them optimise and improve their lending process but also helps them reach more customers who might otherwise lack access to credit due to the absence of substantial financial information. With the growing levels of mobile phone penetration, it is important for financial service providers to identify telco data as a crucial source of customer data not just for optimising their lending processes but also for the growth of their lending business.
PowerCred enables financial service providers to seamlessly access their customer’s telco data from the most used telco service providers in Indonesia. Such data is ethically sourced in a compliant manner to enable financial service providers to make smarter lending decisions with insights from this data.
For a complete list of data parameters that can be accessed using our telco integrations, get in touch with our team or read our documentation. You may also request a quick demo of our telco integration.
