Aligning Telco and Bank Data for Sprint / Home Credit
The ever-growing trend for the interconnection between a telecommunication service provider and a financial institution remains a significant contributor to the long-term sustainability and survival of both industries. Sprint and Home Credit wanted underwriting services for financing mobile phones and accessories through Sprint’s leasing and installment billing program. Learn how Simplity helped to deliver this data driven project.
Challenge
Aligning data between the customer, contract, installment, and payment information
The interconnection between a telecommunication service provider and a financial institution remains a significant factor for both industries. In 2015, Sprint, the fourth-largest mobile phone company in the United States, and Home Credit International, a Czech-based financial institution specializing in consumer loans, launched Home Credit U.S. (HCUS), as a joint venture to deliver underwriting services for financing mobile phones and accessories through Sprint’s leasing and installment billing program.
Under a strategic partnership between the two companies, HCUS would improve Sprint’s credit scoring capabilities and offer loans to sub-prime clients to finance phones and equipment. However, this initiative required the critical alignment between the customer, contract, installment, and payment information.
The specific challenge lay in the different worlds of telco and bank data: while HCUS’ risk calculations were based on banking data, behavioral calculations had to be performed on data from the telco billing system.Objective
Align the different worlds of telco and banking data
Bring the data of multiple institutions from two different sectors (telco and finance) together under one umbrella (HCUS), allowing for the strategic use of customer, contract, installment, and payment information data. While HCUS’ risk calculations were based on banking data, behavioral calculations had to be performed on data from the telco billing system.
Solution
Within Home Credit’s DWH project, Simplity’s consultants, experienced in both banking and telco industries, helped to understand the billing system and related data, which covered the end-to-end handling of payment information. By creating a business data model, translating between the two worlds, Simplity could perform the complex transformation. Simplity's Accurity Business Glossary software was successfully piloted to maintain this model along with its accurate mappings.
Once the telco specific data had been mapped and transformed to the banking world, the quality of the calculated data needed to be evaluated, and accepted by the users of the data, the HCUS Risk Unit. Simplity took the initiative to implement subsequent test phases to evaluate, test, and to reconcile the source and target data accordingly.
Benefits
The aligned telco and bank data have enabled Home Credit’s advanced scoring models to create credit records for the subprime segment of Sprint’s 57 million customers.
As a result, Home Credit can now provide lending arrangements tailored to customers' circumstances, widening the range of loans offered for mobile phones to a “more risky” category of customers than Sprint may have otherwise contemplated alone. In this way, Sprint could access new customers who may have considered that they had only limited opportunities to obtain financing for their wireless needs.
Not only could Home Credit acquire mobile know-how in one of the most advanced and sophisticated telco markets in the world, but also gain access to Sprint’s large customer base. This resulted in HCUS being able to offer a wider package of loans without being linked to specific purchases, and in addition, it could offer credit cards to its customers.
In the longer term, the strategic partnership aims to deepen cooperation between Sprint and Home Credit, expanding both customer and product coverage.
The partnership of Sprint (powerful reputation of innovative skills in the wireless industry including the launch of iPhone Forever and Direct 2 You) and Home Credit (superior underwriting and risk management expertise), along with its world-class IT platform, will allow this partnership to look to the future to harness this significantly enhanced data landscape, thus extending its scope to broaden its revenue streams and increase profitability.
