Accelitas SVP shares insights on volatile market and fintech solutions in State of Identity’s latest podcast Accelitas: Reimagining Financial Access  

As the leading podcast for the identity industry, State of Identity hosts conversations designed to dig deep into the technologies, companies, and paradigms that are defining the world today. When the program welcomed Accelitas Senior Vice President Jimmy Williams recently, host Cameron D’Ambrosi wanted to know what observations, macro-trends, and technologies the company was bringing to the identity space. 

Turns out it was more than the typical discussion of thin-file and no-file credit consumers. Williams explained how alternative data and predictive analytics are already helping lenders access and identify the estimated 50-80 million Americans who are virtually invisible to traditional credit screening. But throw COVID-19 into the mix, he says, and the need for accurate information becomes even more crucial and complex.

“Our goal is to reimagine that access,” Williams explains in the podcast. “And we can now leverage a large pool of data based on the behavior of consumers rather than what they’ve done from a historical credit standpoint.”

Alternative data has already become a powerful analytic tool, but with the onset of COVID-19 and quarantine lifestyles, rapid changes in behavior and economic status have added the necessity of “Essential Real-time Data;” the purchases made at both physical and virtual point-of-sale that have become a proxy for employment and payment behavior, according to Williams.

Describing traditional credit screening as “rear-view mirror” and “one-size-fits-all” approaches, Williams explains how Accelitas technologies and access-driven mission can train and align data to meet a lender’s specific goals — while ensuring fairness and inclusion. 

“Data is changing. Customers are changing. You can’t set it and forget it anymore.” Williams tells D’Ambrosi. “Our mantra is to apply a custom-built model and look for ways to improve and expand that model, but still provide the explainability.”

The half-hour podcast Episode #195 Accelitas: Reimagining Financial Access can be heard in its entirety here.