The past decade has seen massive changes in retail banking as consumer-friendly legislation helps empower fintech innovators to disrupt the traditional means of doing business.
Many established banks and financial institutions have emulated these practices, delivering benefits to their customers as well as reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
Yet some processes have remained little-changed, especially those required to confirm a customer’s identity and validate their income and employment status – whether that’s for a loan or mortgage application, insurance claim or budget monitoring.
Banking account activity can help confirm a person’s earnings, with automated aggregators removing some of the legwork involved, but such programs are only really designed for salaried workers who receive a steady pay cheque each month.
It gets even more complicated when prospective customers have multiple and/or irregular sources of income that require staff to check account documents manually.
But there is a better way.
Rollee’s Payroll API takes you to the original source data, providing a complete picture of a person’s earnings with no need to trawl through their bank account activity to identify when and how much they were paid.
Missed opportunity
From a revenue perspective, banks are simply missing opportunities to acquire new customers and up-sell to existing clients if they lack a quick, effective and reliable means to assess workers with fluctuating earnings from several sources.
Nearly half the 4.4 million people in the UK who work as freelancers or for gig economy platforms such as Uber or Deliveroo also have a full-time job. Yet this additional income rarely figures in bank assessments so these workers’ credit scores are lower than they should be.
Why does that matter? Well, that may lead banks to refuse such customers access to the financial products they need – a lose-lose for everyone – or they cannot borrow as much as they should be entitled to and also probably have to pay higher rates.
These disadvantages aren’t just felt when multiple-income workers try to borrow but also reduce their access to insurance, investments and other financial services too.
So, this is a huge customer segment that is underserved and the financial institutions that change their processes to properly support the ever-growing community of multiple-income workers in the UK will gain a competitive edge on their rivals.
That’s why we’ve built the Rollee Payroll API to enable banks and other institutions to get a complete, near instant and up-to-date understanding of a person’s identity and financial and employment circumstances. In doing so, we’re also expanding the financial opportunities available to workers as their credit score increases thanks to the greater visibility we provide on their earnings.
The API is a brilliant tool that can risk-assess all 27 million working people in the UK, whether they’re a gig worker or a long-serving salaried employee. Here’s how …
Treasure trove
Nearly all employers pay worker salaries via a payroll provider such as Xero or Sage. Rollee’s Payroll API gives financial institutions access - with the explicit consent of the individual – to the treasure trove of data in a customer’s payroll profile, enabling banks to provide tailor-made financial services.
In just a few clicks, Rollee’s Payroll API can tell you which companies a person works for, when they started working for each of their employers, and their gross and net earnings from all their income sources. For freelancers and gig workers who get paid by various clients, Rollee’s payroll API will pull data from their profiles at multiple payroll programs to create a full understanding of their financial situation.
So, the application process becomes more or less automated, removing the chances of human error. No manual data inputting should be needed.
Speedier procedures also mean prospective clients are less likely to go elsewhere, and lenders can sell to more consumers because customer time and acquisition costs are lower.
With income and employment verification so simple and effective, banks can deploy greater safeguards for unsecured lending. More data equals fewer defaults and higher profits.
Beyond credit
The personalised customer data that Rollee’s Payroll API delivers isn’t just transformative for lending and banking practices, but also for fleet management income aggregationand accounting.
Want to know how Rollee’s payroll API can take the pain out of verifying customers by cutting costs and processing times, reducing risk and delivering a measurable benefit to the bottom line? Then please book a free demo by clicking here.
