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Organisations can remain strong and resilient by proactively adapting to Qarar’s trends
Dubai, United Arab Emirates: The risk landscape in the Middle East is changing rapidly. Every day brings new challenges that considerably alter how companies respond to and manage risk. To help companies keep their footing in this shifting landscape, Qarar, a leading regional decision analytics company, is sharing its top five consumer credit risk trends for 2018 in the Middle East.
1. Streamlining Routine Operational Tasks through Automation
Improving operational efficiency is a top priority and savvy organisations are focusing on streamlining routine tasks like customer retention, debt recovery and originations decisions by coupling advanced risk analytics with automated decisioning. Automation of routine tasks across the credit life cycle will be a prominent trend this year.
2. Enhancing the Customer Experience through End-to-End Decisioning
As the Middle East gears up for 2020, banks and financial institutions need to enhance their interactions and messages to meet the growing demand for high quality customer experiences. Delivering individualized experiences at scale by tailoring prices and products to each individual customer by using multiple data sources and increased predictive and self-learning analytics will help create that sought after personalised customer experience.
3. Social Media Data Paves the Way for Alternative Credit Scoring
With the rise of social media platforms, lenders now have the potential to harness large volumes of non-traditional data to assess creditworthiness. This is particularly valuable in the UAE, where social media penetration is high but credit histories are limited as vast portions of the population are highly transient or expats. 2018 will see innovative lenders using this alternative data to assess thinner-file borrowers like students and expats.
4. Establishing a Robust Framework for IFRS 9 models
One of the key challenges for banks in the region and indeed the world will be to establish a robust validation framework for IFRS 9 models and ECL calculation. These models are already in place but validating and monitoring them is another matter, particularly as the IFRS 9 accounting standard will increase provisioning requirements for banks. Addressing this situation is of paramount importance in 2018.
5. Adopting Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics to Fight Financial Fraud
Fraud risks are growing in speed and complexity, and as a result 2018 will see banks adopting artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics to fight this fraud. Financial executives will move to introduce appropriate processes, develop and acquire the necessary talent, and create the right culture to integrate analytics into their fraud-detection efforts.
Zaid Kamhawi, CEO of Qarar, concluded: “We need to outline new opportunities and challenges for risk leaders and help them to identify ways to mitigate risk, create value and ultimately influence our client’s performance. This can be achieved only by knowing what trends lay ahead and how to prepare for them. Our strategic discussions around risk need to evolve. By considering our top five consumer credit risk trends and proactively adapting to them, we hope companies can remain resilient and strong in the face of rapid change.”
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About Qarar
Qarar is the region’s leading Decision Analytics Company specialised in offering consulting, decision analytics and software technology to deliver tailor-made customer management and process automation solutions. Headquartered in Dubai and serving customers across the Middle East and North Africa, Qarar helps its clients to solve business challenges and achieve sustainable business outcomes. We achieve this across the customer lifecycle by employing the right mix of predictive analytics, and market experience based advisory and decision technologies. Our expertise spans Strategy, Pricing, Credit Risk Management, Marketing and Sales Analytics.
