ID Analytics Now Has 85% Visibility Into Online Consumer Lending

October 24, 2017 | By: Sean Murray

At Money2020, deBanked caught up with Kevin King, Director of Product Marketing and Ken Meiser, VP of Identity Solutions for ID Analytics. The last time I crossed paths with the company was six months ago at the LendIt Conference in New York City. Since then, the company has increased its visibility into the online consumer lending market to 85%.

Because so many lenders, including credit card issuers, are plugged into their system, ID Analytics can view where consumers are applying for credit across the spectrum. That’s bolstered by their visibility into where applicants are in the process with getting approved. “We’re seeing the lifecycle of that application,” said King, who added that it’s possible using their tool that a lender can know where in the process a borrower is with another lender, though without the ability to see who that lender is.

ID Analytics is not a credit bureau, but they can help lenders root out fraud by analyzing among many other factors, the “velocity” of a consumer’s credit applications. An example is the number of credit applications submitted in a short amount of time. It’s important to distinguish what kind of credit it is though, King and Meiser explained, because the way people apply for online loans can be different than how they apply for credit cards.

Meiser shared an example of something that might on its face look anomalous but is actually not, such as when someone moves and all of the sudden there are several credit applications tied to a home address never previously seen on record for that borrower. Are we talking about normal stuff like a store credit card at Home Depot to buy a refrigerator for the new house or is it for multiple loans? was the gist of a point he made.

ID Analytics won’t declare a loan application to be fraud, they just provide the lender with an ID Score®, a real-time fluid score that can signal to a lender to carry out more due diligence depending on the extremity of the score. If someone applies for five loans in one day, for example, that score could go up with each application. Their service helps root out fraud by looking at “leading indicators” rather than “trailing indicators,” they said.

“We’ve seen an interesting shift in how fraudsters are attacking,” King stated. The company is now reviewing about 1 million credit applications a day and can continuously scan for new trends. 7 out of the top 10 credit card issuers use their service, as do many online lenders and phone carriers.

Asked if their service would have anything to do with online lenders asking the occasional borrower to submit a utility bill or other document to confirm their identity all while other borrowers are not asked at all.

Lenders use a lot of their own factors, but if they’re suddenly asking for more documents to prove an applicant’s identity, there’s a good chance that could be because of us, they said.

Last modified: October 24, 2017