A global study of credit self-monitoring, with Charlie Wise
In the last five years, one hundred million Americans have started to monitor their credit reports with TransUnion for the first time. One hundred million. And the same thing is happening all around the world. But just because everyone is doing it, doesn't mean they're doing it for the same reason: some consumers are in a bind and looking for a way back to good credit; some are planning a major loan and want to optimise their options; some want to make sure everything is untouched and as it should be.
So, in their latest global study of the phenomenon, TransUnion set out to see if each of these goals is being helped by the credit self-monitoring, and I'm chatting to Charlie Wise to find out what they learned.
Charlie is Senior Vice President, Research and Consulting at TransUnion and is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-wise-959570/
TransUnion is at https://www.transunion.com/
This particular research is also being discussed here for the US and here for the UK: https://www.transunion.co.uk/lp/consumer-monitoring-motivations
Please seek me out on LinkedIn, too, where I'm open to all genuine new connections - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanlegrange - please also follow the show's page while you're there.
Meanwhile, my action-adventure novels are on Amazon, some versions even for free, and my work with ConfirmU and our gamified psychometric scores is discussed at https://confirmu.com/ and on episode 24 of this show https://www.howtolendmoneytostrangers.show/episodes/episode-24
And finally, I'm also co-creating a new podcast called hAIghtened senses which will look at the intersection between human senses and technology, especially AI-powered technology. You can already start to follow it wherever you're listening to this one - there's only a trailer there at the moment, but we've recorded some of the early episodes and it's going to be a fun ride!
Keep well, BrendanAnd finally, I'm also co-creating a new podcast called hAIghtened senses which will look at the intersection between human senses and technology, especially AI-powered technology. You can already start to follow it wherever you're listening to this one - there's only a trailer there at the moment, but we've recorded some of the early episodes and it's going to be a fun ride!
Keep well, Brendan
The full written transcript, with timestamps, is below:
Charlie Wise 0:00
The numbers have been enormous. In the US as a for instance, we've seen 100 million consumers who have started monitoring their credit for the first time with TransUnion over the last five years, and we've seen those consumers who start monitoring their credit are far more active in opening new accounts over the next year, than consumers that don't monitor their credit.
That's the what's in it for the lenders. They know that consumer is starting to monitor with a goal of seeking credit. And those benefits really were universal in terms of the markets we looked at, which is interesting that this is not a country specific a cultural a any other thing like there are things that transcend markets.
Brendan Le Grange 0:45
I know Charlie Wise, well, because I worked for him for four or five years, but you may know Charlie Wise from one of his many international appearances at TransUnion Summits, from Hong Kong to Mumbai to London to Las Vegas, and several places north and south of that line. Charlie oversees TransUnion's team of financial services, research and consultants who take advantage of the credit bureaus unique bird's eye view of a consumers credit wallet to identify forces that shaped the market and impacts at a higher level, the industry that we all work in.
Often those problems vary by region, you might have different concerns in the US and Canada, to those in Latin America and South Africa, but sometimes we get to benefit from that global reach with an international study that looks at the same question across all the markets in which TransUnion operates. And that's what we have to talk about today: how do consumers benefit by understanding and educating themselves on their own unique credit situation.
And now as I say, Charlie's teams, they research and explain and share interesting credit stories with key players in the marketplace. That's quite similar to what I do with the show. And I think there's great benefits to that for me to speak to you as an audience, and share those stories, of course, but also for me as an interviewer to have one on one conversations with industry players around the world. And that's what I want to open up to you today, I'm going to start offering the opportunity to do co branded miniseries with me. If you work in lending or near lending, and you're interested in the benefits of doing a podcast can bring that maybe you don't have the motivation to roll out a show every week, he can be very difficult to do that, that maybe you've got four to six key targets that you would like to approach you would like to speak to one on one and get to know better, while a podcast might be the way to do that.
So reach out to me, brendan @ HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show or via one of the links on social media and such. And we can talk about making that happen. You can come on to the show and co host with me, and we'll learn more about your customers, your partners or your staff together.
But now let's get back to Charlie Wise.
Charlie Wise, senior vice president of research and consulting for TransUnion Welcome back to the show.
Charlie Wise 3:35
Thanks. Great to be back with you. And nice to see you again.
Brendan Le Grange 3:37
Always great to catch up. And yeah, I don't want to put too much pressure on this follow up. But your last episode was the second most shared one on LinkedIn for 2023 for my show, so
Charlie Wise 3:49
Only the second?! Darnit, I can do better.
Brendan Le Grange 3:52
Yeah, but it was by half, the most shared one was quite an anomaly. But yes, I think this is what people enjoy. So we'll get into some research that your team has been doing. And I think why it's particularly appealing? Well, it's two levels. One at TransUnion, as a credit bureau, you get that bird's eye view of an industry, but more so with your team. It's a global bird's eye view, where you can see what's happening in a number of markets, which really allows us to test out some theories and see some things at play. But before we get to that maybe some of those people who didn't see last time episode being shared around the internet, maybe not so familiar with you and your team, what is the goal of that team within the organization?
Charlie Wise 4:33
So TransUnion is a credit bureau we collect, parse, analyze, match, and distribute credit data on consumers in about 33 countries around the world. The US, Canada, UK, India, Colombia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Philippines, the list goes on.
And a lot of what we do as a company is provide the data provide the insights to lenders on consumers and their credit behaviors, to enable them to make loans to provide credit to provide access to things like credit cards and housing loans, etc. And my team, the research and consulting team sits on top of that data. And we're constantly analyzing that to understand what are the trends that we're seeing in the various credit markets around the world, we're transient operates.
Obviously, we spend a lot of time in the US is where TransUnion is headquartered, but I've got teams in different markets around the world doing similar things, trying to understand what are consumers doing, how are they acting? Are they taking care of their credit, and positioning themselves well to continue to grow throughout their credit careers?
Brendan Le Grange 5:41
Yeah, and Charlie, we initially struggled to find the time for this interview because first you were in London, getting ready for a Summit there, then you were in India, and then you were in Hong Kong delivering Summits there and there, now you're getting ready to deliver a summit in the US!
So let's start where we normally finish, if people are interested in that research that you and your team are producing, where can they go online to get a view of that, and also maybe to see about the summits that are happening in the markets?
Charlie Wise 6:13
All of the research that we do, we publish, and we have access to that through transunion.com. And if you're not in the US, there are countries specific pages for the respective markets you may be in. And that's where my team will push our research that you can download specific studies, reports, etc, around the various research topics that we look at, as well. As you mentioned our summits. These are in region, invitation only events. So we really do target not just necessarily our largest customers, but certainly senior level decision makers.
So if you are in the lending community, or very close to consumer lending, and you want to be part of that, if you're working with TransUnion. Now, please talk to your TransUnion sales rep about how to get on our invitation list for the summit. And if you're not talking to TransUnion. Currently, we certainly recommend that you do that. And the Summit's are one of the many benefits of working with us.
Brendan Le Grange 7:06
Charlie, we're mainly here to talk about this global study that was fairly recently released, showcasing the value of credit education for Financial Inclusion and credit education here not being so much the sort of lists of to do's and not to do's bad credit education in terms of consumers keeping themselves up to date on the state of their credit profiles on the bureau. So it's a project that's very close to my heart, having I like to think played a role in structuring some of the foundational research on which this is built when I was in Hong Kong, but set the scene for us, what behaviors were studied what sort of people were studied?
Charlie Wise 7:44
Right, so the the topic is around credit monitoring. And as you as you describe this is really working with TransUnion, or the other credit bureaus in your respective markets to get access to your own credit data. So the same data that TransUnion makes available to lenders, we also make available to consumers.
And in virtually every market that we're in, we have ways that consumers can access their credit reports their credit data directly from TransUnion. But we also work with a lot of lenders, banks, credit card issuers, and others to make consumers data available through their own websites, you can get your credit data, you can get your credit scores. So that's what we call credit monitoring. That's the foundation and we have seen, certainly through the pandemic, this, I'll call it explosion. But it's it's really true.
The numbers have been enormous of consumers who have started for the first time monitoring their credits, and it's cumulative, a lot of credits, consumers start, and they continue to monitor their credits annually, monthly, weekly, some cases daily. And in the US, as a for instance, we've seen 100 million consumers who have started monitoring their credit for the first time with TransUnion over the last five years.
That's a huge, huge number of consumers.
Because consumers are becoming aware that it's important to know what's on your credit report, it's important to know whether your behaviors are contributing to good credit scores and good credit standing, or whether there are blemishes on your credit report that may be keeping you from getting the things you want. And so that's really the you know, the foundation of what we've seen.
But really more importantly, we wanted to understand when consumers start monitoring their credit for the first time. Why did they do it? What are the goals in monitoring credit? And are they able to achieve their goals compared to consumers that were able to see on the credit file that don't monitor their credit?
Brendan Le Grange 8:32
It's worth pausing on a few things they one is that comment you made about the stickiness of this habit and I think you're checking your credit score, you know, checking your bank account when you when you're not sure how much is in there going to the doctor when you're feeling something a little bit of the hardest part is starting, you know that fear of the unknown.
And I think that's probably true in this credit monitoring space that people are perhaps nervous to start, too, unsure how to start, and then once they start, you can say, okay, now I can improve, even if the picture is bad, I can improve or okay, it's better than I thought, I can work with this and optimize it.
So yeah, understanding why people start is incredibly important, because that's how we can get them with this habit that has many benefits for themselves and the industry.
And the second one is obviously, you can, of course, come to credit monitoring, with different purposes in mind. I mean, probably, if we think of the two extremes, the one is somebody who knows their repayment history has been a bit up and down, they expect a credit to be in a weak position. And they need some credit now, are they interested in taking new credit, and they just want some reassurance or some understanding of the situation so they can start improving it. The other extreme, people who know they've paid everything they up to date, there have been for 10 years on all the products they have, but they just want to make sure that there's no identity theft, there's no strange accounts being opened no misreporting of data from somewhere no, doctor's bill or, in the UK or South Africa, TV licence bills are notorious for popping up at something you didn't even know you are in.
So we've got different types of people different purposes that people are coming to monitor credit. How did you handle those competing or those different goals? How did you sort of split people up?
Charlie Wise 11:29
Yes, the three behavior segments we identified are, and like with all good segmentation schemes, we gave them pithy, little names. So we have credit seekers, credit improvers, and credit managers, and you can qualitatively see them but it's, it's really much more important to say, Are there really measurable segments that we can put you into. So the credit seekers are those consumers with pretty good credit scores? You know, we essentially said if you've got a near prime or above credit score, meaning your credit eligible, you start monitoring credit with the likely goal that you want to open a new account within the next 12 months.
And in fact, we identified those consumers as those who started monitoring their credit, and then opened at least one or more new accounts in the next 12 months. So the stated goal, or the intended goal is likely that consumer wanted to make sure that everything was in good standing before they show up at the bank before they go online and apply because they don't want that negative experience of getting of getting dinged.
The other two segments, the credit improvers, those are people with poor credit scores in the subprime category. And they start monitoring credit with the likely goal of improving their credit situation improving their credit scores getting themselves in a position that they actually can get access to credit or more affordable credit by improving their credit standing. So really the measurable goal there would be do they actually see improvements in their credit scores. And then the third segment of those credit managers, these are people that have decent credit scores already near prime or above all the way up to super prime, and they're really making sure that everything is in good shape. In some cases, they may want to be actually paying down their balances and other cases.
And we did survey a lot of consumers in the different segments, they want to protect against fraud, they want to make sure that nothing happens. They want to keep an eye on their credit, because we've seen this rampant rise in fraud behavior, certainly during and after the pandemic. And consumers want to make sure that fraudsters are not preying on their their good credit names, taking over accounts, opening new accounts in their names.
So those are the three segments that we studied. And we because we're able to look at our credit files, we're able to see when consumers start monitoring their credit with TransUnion. And what happens in the in the months and years after.
Brendan Le Grange 13:50
Yeah, and I said earlier that, you know, I had a bit of history in this sort of research with you. But actually, my experience of credit monitoring goes a little bit further back in time, but more ingloriously.
So a good friend of mine, Tracy Dent, and I'm getting old enough that it's hard to tell whether it's 10 or 15 years, but she got a role within one of the bureaus to head up or to build a team for a credit self monitoring product that they were going to sell. And I genuinely could not understand what the purpose was. This was in South Africa where by law, you get access to one free report per Bureau per year, I couldn't understand how a lender would pay a bureau to give away something for free. And yeah, I've never been so wrong. I did then have to later in life sit down with the founder of Credit Karma that was just taking off built on this. So I very clearly misunderstood but I'm imagining the credit seekers, you know, these people with good credit who are planning ahead, this is a pretty target rich environment for lenders looking for good customers who got low risk and credit hungry.
Charlie Wise 14:55
Absolutely. And that's the interesting thing about the you know, the lender There are other financial institutions making this data available to consumers. So once upon a time, really the credit bureaus were the only place that consumers could easily access or frankly, at all access, their credit reports their credit data.
And those other sources have really come on strong in the last eight to 10 years third party sites in the US, companies like Credit Karma have really emerged that make that data available to consumers for free. So that, you know, consumers can access that and really is very easy to use. The benefit to them is they can see those consumers who are looking for their credit, and they can serve up offers for credit cards for other types of products and services.
And now banks and credit card issuers, other institutions, they're getting in on the game as well, providing access portals through their websites through their phone apps. They know that consumers have started monitoring their credit, they know that consumers coming back to check and do our study, we've seen those consumers who start monitoring their credit who are in that credit seeker segment are far more active in opening new accounts over the next year, then consumers that don't monitor their credit that have no record with TransUnion have credit monitoring activity. And so that really is an interesting signal.
If you're a bank or a lender, credit union card, issuer, whatever. And you have that insight, that consumer is starting to monitor their credit, and know that they're more credit hungry, and that they qualify for what you're offering, you have an early insight that other lenders may not to serve up offers to that consumer to offer them a credit card to offer them a debt consolidation loan to offer them a mortgage or a home loan, or vehicle loan, I think these are all real important insights. That's the what's in it for the lenders, they can almost have kind of that you know that first go with that consumer.
Brendan Le Grange 16:50
You spoke about a rapid increase in the behavior post COVID. But the scale of these numbers is truly astonishing. So I see the headline from your US press release was that more than half of American consumers use credit monitoring to open new credit accounts.
So this isn't just you as sort of a niche group of people making it maybe it was a decade ago who took great interest in their credit scores. This is a massive part of the market. Absolutely.
Charlie Wise 17:17
And we see that this is not just a US phenomena, we, again, we did this this global study in markets around the world. And this was a very common theme that we saw across markets that the primary motivation for consumers when they started credit monitoring is they want to open accounts, they want to make sure they know what they qualify for.
Does credit monitoring drive more of that behavior? I think really what it is, is that consumers, they want to engage with financial institutions with confidence, they want to know, what do they look like to that lender, there's a certain amount of embarrassment that consumers have, because they don't shop for credit every day in showing up being told no, nobody wants that. You want to be able to know what you qualify for. And know that, hey, if my credit is pretty good, maybe I should shop around maybe I really do have have the leverage to to seek a good deal. If I don't like the the terms of the pricing, I get from lender a guest to check out lender B. I'm worth it. I know because I got my credit my credit data.
Brendan Le Grange 18:19
And obviously, the prices all around the world are far higher than they used to be interest rates are higher than they used to be. If you're looking at something like do I buy a new car this year? Or do I wait another year, you know, this sort of activity can make a big difference in the cost of your financing, you could look at it and say, well, actually, my credit is not that great at the moment. But if I put in six months of good discipline, I can get that same car or your next year's model at a much lower APR that allows you their control. They're not be sitting in front of somebody's face to face and have to panic and either walk out or except, you know, whatever deals offered.
And if we talk about credit improvers and credit managers, that aspect becomes even clearer. It's this ability to have feedback, you know, in an environment where, of course, we understand if you don't pay your loan back, your credit score will get worse. But beyond that there's so many levers. Some of them are very intuitive, some of them not as intuitive to a consumer. If they only get a credit report every few years when they refinance a mortgage or something like that. It's very hard to know which behaviors to adjust. You know, of course, try and spend less try and earn more. But, you know, we didn't have that feedback. Whereas now as you say, it can come down to daily updates on some apps, you know, you can get the data and that feedback much closer to the behavior that caused it and therefore respond a lot better.
So people that are credit improving, are we seeing effectiveness from that from having access to that data and that sort of quick feedback loop? Absolutely.
Charlie Wise 19:56
And that was an interesting hypothesis that we have have tested before and we wanted to kind of look, again, is this idea that if a consumer with poor credit scores, subprime is really what we're targeting in this case, do we see over the next 12 months improvements in those consumers credit scores relative to consumers that don't monitor their credit.
And so when we compare it against consumers that don't monitor their credit, we do see materially higher score improvements for those credit monitoring consumers, relative to the others, and does the active credit monitoring actually result in your score improving now there's nothing about looking at your credit score that causes your score to improve, it's not like every time I hit refresh my score ticks up.
But it's the same idea with joining a gym or a health club, the act of joining the health club doesn't cause you to improve, you actually have to show up and do the work, lift the weights and stretch and do the sweat stuff. It's very similar with credit monitoring, which is, if that's your goal, you may not know how or where to start, but you know, wrapped around this credit monitoring, knowing what's what's contributing to it. Are your balances too high? Are you chronically missing payments? And then you don't realize, like, wow, I've been laid on eight of my last 12 credit card payments, okay, now I understand and embedded within a lot of these credit monitoring tools, or education and things around, what would it take to improve that? What would happen if you consolidate your credit cards onto a personal loan, and pay those off? What would happen to your score if you if you started paying at least the minimums on your credit cards, but had timely payments for the next six months? You know, if you step on the scale every day, you're not going to see material improvements. But sometimes it's just nice to be able to check that progress as you're going and saying, is this working? Am I getting better? And so again, I would say it's not causal, it's highly correlated.
But I think that's really important to say, if you're a lender, and you've and you're making this available to a consumer with a with a subprime credit score, and they start monitoring, well, there's a good chance that that consumer may see a material improvement in their score, and you may want to stick with them stay close to them. So when their score improves, to the point where they do qualify, you're gonna know that pretty early, and you can maybe be the first to make them that offer that they now qualify for when they reach that threshold.
Brendan Le Grange 22:11
And I think it's also reflective of a bigger change in role of credit bureaus in the space and a role that's changed long ago. But I think perspectives in people's minds take a lot longer to change. But you know, when I started my career, credit bureaus were mainly about negative files whose mistake payments and kind of a blacklist of the naughty children.
And in most countries, by now, we've moved to comprehensive credit bureaus where we're not saying, Okay, we've already keep track of your mistakes, we also keeping track of all the payments people do make and all the balances, they get paid down on time, and all the limits that are well maintained and such to give us that comprehensive picture, and we can monitor and manage credit much better. We're not wanting to wait for somebody to default, and then say haha, she'll credit scores in the gone down the drain, we wanting to say to people, hey, you know that action is had a knock on your score, you could do something about it now and stay within the boundaries. And likewise, oh, yeah, that habit you did for one or two months is improving it is helping keep it up.
And I think COVID helped in the general thinking of collections that were also a little bit less big stick and sort of angry, shouting down the phone to pay the debts back and more of this working together cooperative approach with borrowers who are maybe struggling and lenders. And, yeah, this is a key part of it, or can be a key part of it, and is so well established, or globally that we can talk about in a minute, but it's great to see it delivering real results.
So I think the last thing worth checking is that third group of people are the case the forgotten middle, the credit managers, what are we seeing them get out of this process?
Charlie Wise 23:54
So there's multiple potential goals, if you're in the credit manager category, and one is just the not very sexy, I just want to make sure everything's okay, right.
And that's an it's very valid, I mean, I subscribe to credit monitoring services and beyond my going in and checking my own credit score and looking at the credit reports, I get these monthly alerts. And essentially, those alerts say everything is okay. Like you're in the clear. And I think that's important because those, those same alerts, if a new account was opened, trust me, I have opened accounts before and boom, I get the the alerts right away. Yep, I did it. I went bought a car and I and I financed that.
But if something gets opened and you don't recognize it, that's very possibly a fraudster, you need to know about that as soon as possible to make sure that the damage is minimized. In many cases, if you catch things early, it will go away and as if it never happened, if you don't know about it, bad things can happen over time because it's going to look like you.
So a lot of this is just making sure things are okay. But we do know that a good number of kids Zoomers do have a goal of paying down debt. They say okay, I'm my credit is in good standing right now. But I want to reduce my debt for whatever reason. And we actually do see for those consumers, when we look at their balance trends across all products over the 12 months after they start monitoring their credit for the first time, versus consumers that don't monitor their credit, we see more of a balanced decline for those credit managers that that that particular segments, and you may save, you know, if you're thinking about the lender's perspective, well, I don't want to lose balances, that's not a profitable recipe for me, if that's their goal, and you can help them with their with that goal, then that consumer when they need things in the future, and they're very likely to because needs change all the time, is going to be potentially more likely to look to you the lender that provided them the tools to meet their their needs to meet their goals, then another one, and in fact, we asked consumers, you know, we we spent a lot of time looking at the data that's on our credit file, to measure those behaviors and to look empirically what happens.
But we also we want to get the voice of the consumer. And we conduct regular surveys of consumers. And we looked at consumers who started credit monitoring, ask them questions around why they started, what was their goal, and a good portion of consumers, a significant percentage said that they would feel more positively about lenders that made credit monitoring available to them more tangibly, they said, they would be more likely to look to that lender when they open future credit products. So that's a loyalty play.
They also say they're more likely to pay the bills, to the lenders that make that available. So thinking about payment hierarchy and thinking about consumers that if they do struggle, and have to decide which bills to pay, that they may be more likely to actually pay the lenders that make that available to them. So again, that loyalty play really may come back to help lenders in terms of future growth, as well as risk avoidance.
Brendan Le Grange 27:01
Yeah, and I think that's what makes the study. So interesting is that extra layer of the voice of the consumer. And that also means there's a whole lot of insights in many different directions. We won't cover a half of them in the show today. But yeah, using those links, we spoke about earlier, reports art for the different countries you studied.
If we talk about those countries, and we take that extra high level view now. You've got data from the US, Canada, Colombia, India, Hong Kong, South Africa, it's developed developing markets north south east west, a wide range of different possibilities. Are there any big surprising similarities or differences between any of those markets worth calling out? I mean, I think overall, this is a fairly universal truth, or I don't maybe I shouldn't say truth, that's maybe every committee but a fairly universal set of rules about customer behavior. But are there any variations that also teach us a little bit about the more subtle behaviors at play,
Charlie Wise 28:00
Some of the similarities just come down to the demographics and the risk profiles of the consumers who start monitoring their credit, you look at the overall credit active market, and then you look specifically at those that start monitoring their credit, the credit monitoring consumers are a riskier population. So these are consumers that in many cases are engaging with credit monitoring.
Because they fall into a higher risk profile, they're uncertain, they don't know what they may qualify for, or they may not know how to improve their their credit standing. And they're engaging with credit monitoring to do that, we also find that they're younger, in the US, over half of them who start monitoring are Gen Z, millennials, look at India at 80%. You know, about two thirds and Canada so skews younger, and skews riskier?
That's one of the similarity things, which is actually I mean, certainly, from the perspective of younger consumers, I mean, talk to any lender, you know, they're always looking to say how do we build relationships with younger consumers who are earlier in their credit journey, this is potentially a good way to do that, not just to existing customers, but many lenders make it available to anybody who shows up, you don't have to be a customer of that bank, that card issuer, you can sign up for these services for free. And you now have a relationship with them, they know things about you, you know things about them and, and, and good things are likely to happen as a result of that. So that was one of the findings in terms of who they are.
But again, we found that the percentages of consumers in those different segments that credit seekers to credit builders or credit managers, it varies by market, and certainly in certain markets, that where you find a higher percentage of riskier consumers, you're going to get more of those credit improvers and in other markets, more credit seekers but I do think that the the same types of benefits I was talking about the credit seekers opening more new accounts then then the non monitoring consumers that credit improvers seeing those score improvement those benefits really were universe
So in terms of the the markets we looked at, which is interesting that this is not a country specific, a cultural a any other thing like this is maybe overstating to say it's a universal truth. But there are things that transcend markets that is common to consumers, regardless of what market you're in. Yeah,
Brendan Le Grange 30:18
There's a really non invasive way to help the consumer stay on track to get repaid in the economic environment that is way more difficult than, say, five years ago. So it's almost, I think it's safe to say it's a no brainer for anybody in the consumer lending space, at least.
But surely, it's not the only research your team is doing. Yeah, I haven't left you enough time to expand it too much. But are there any other hot topics, anything else that's coming out or was recently come out from the team, that people listening might want to go online to seek out?
Charlie Wise 30:54
I mean, we're always doing studies in different markets, and a lot of what we're seeing right now, some of the kind of cross country trends that we're seeing is that a lot of consumers in many markets have been significantly impacted by inflation, don't need to tell your listeners in the UK about that. You know, it's it's certainly been insidious in the in the UK, the US, Canada, India, it's definitely impacted consumers and their capacity to manage all of their obligations, not just death, but everything rent, utility payments, insurance, etc. And a lot of consumers are feeling stressed, we've seen debt levels rising in many markets.
And we have seen rising delinquencies in many of the markets that that we're looking at, because many consumers are having to rely on debt having to rely on borrowings to help meet their spending needs. And some consumers are falling behind. Some consumers are struggling to make timely payments at higher rates than we have seen recently. So that really is driving our team to look at how can we identify consumers that are resilient, versus those that are more vulnerable, based on their current situation.
And beyond just looking at a credit score credit scores are very valuable, but in many cases, lenders they want to continue to grow, they want to continue to provide access to credit, who are the people that need and deserve it and would benefit from this? But how can you do that in a in a safe way. And so we call it a kind of smart growth. And we're doing a lot of research around market specific that using a lot of the same methodologies to say how can we look beyond just the credit scores, to identify factors of resiliency within consumers, like in the UK, we have terrific data around affordability that really helps us to better understand consumers and both sides of the ledger they're at, you know, the the income side as well as the expense side, other attributes in other insights we have in different markets, but really, with that common goal of how can we provide lenders with more data tools, analytics, to help them to identify and meet the needs of those resilient consumers, while protecting their own balance sheets?
It's a it's a big hot topic for us.
Brendan Le Grange 33:10
Yeah, and obviously, that's another great example of where that bird's eye view comes into. into account. There are some big banks that feel like they've got a you know, enough of a market share to have a universal view. But in reality, very few get a big enough sample of enough products as well, to really understand what's happening in their consumers lives, especially as more and more data becomes available, you know, rental repayments, buy now pay laters and things that can get brought under the umbrella of the credit bureau and incorporated into these consumer views.
So yeah, come transunion.com or local equivalent by probably easiest for anybody who knows their TransUnion sales rep or anybody at TransUnion, is just reach out directly and ask for your research and consulting person to come and talk through some of these learnings. Because as you say, Here, delinquencies are rising. Yeah, they're they're rising because of very real market pressures. It is the time to make sure we fully understand what our consumers going through and how we can help them. So I encourage everyone to go visit those sites and stay up to date with that research that's coming out. I'll put those links in the show notes as well. And yeah, if you are invited to your local Summit, I'm sure you'll have a great time. They're always full of fun and information. So Charlie, great to see you again.
Thank you for coming back on the show.
Charlie Wise 34:27
always wonderful to catch up. Thanks, and I look forward to next time.
Brendan Le Grange 34:31
And thank you all for listening.
Please do look for and follow the show on your favourite podcast platform and share the updates widely on LinkedIn where lending nerds are found in our largest concentration. Plus, send me a connection request while you're there.
This show is written and recorded by myself Brendan le Grange in Brighton, England and edited by Fina Charleson of FC Productions.
Show music is by Iam_wake, and you can find show notes and written transcripts at www.HowtoLendMoneytoStrangers.show and I'll see you again next Thursday.