Mar 2020 | Covid-19 | Business Resilience

In these times of global transformation and economic uncertainty, commercial resilience and the ability to maintain business continuity remains the best defence.

As many companies task themselves with understanding, reacting to, and learning lessons from a changing world, there are some very straightforward routes to ensuring early warning systems are in place to flag signs of financial stress, help prevent delinquency and protect against risk.

However, even during challenging trading conditions, the ability to adapt to evolving markets at speed and scale to disruption, while protecting customers, assets and reputation, is already separating top-performing firms from competitors.

Based on Experian’s ongoing analysis for our clients world-wide, we have distilled 10 steps for ensuring the continued acquisition of new customers, safeguarding existing customers and upholding business quality. Here, we present Steps 8-10; you can read about the first 4 Steps here, and Steps 5-7 here.

Commercial Resilience: Steps 8-10

“More than ever, we need to stay on the front foot and position ourselves to help our clients and consumers, to support them as their priorities change and as new needs emerge,” says Lizardo Espinosa, Director Commercial Strategy Benelux & France for Experian. “Experian believes that preparedness is the key to meeting today’s challenges, and to maintaining resilience and continuity.”

8. Make way for agile customer management strategies
In a rapidly shifting landscape, automating and streamlining customer management and collections processes, will support recovery management initiatives and enable organisations to continually help rehabilitate customers, minimise the risk of exposure to bad debt and maintain revenue streams. Read more about customer management and collections.

9. Use expert insights to forecast credit risk carefully
To help businesses interpret complex and shifting information, having advanced modelling capabilities at your fingertips becomes indispensable. Where expert opinion can differ on critical issues, combining lending policy and economic forecasts enables more forward-looking risk modelling. This union of the disciplines of credit risk and economics will help you meet continually evolving commercial and regulatory requirements and plan successful credit risk strategies. Find out how to forecast with advanced modelling capabilities.

10. Make the most of market insights and economic information
Despite periods of uncertainty, it’s still possible to pave the way for future business growth. Companies around the world are already using economic trend analysis, credit market insights and portfolio benchmarking to best-inform their credit risk strategies. This can include everything from new business acquisition, through to customer management and debt prioritisation. As the COVID-19 crisis changes our businesses in important ways, it’s an opportunity to understand the impact of changes in your own lending policies as well as shifts in external markets and regulations that may affect performance.

As the world acts to mitigate the impact of uncertainty, the need for businesses to up their resilience and adaptability will extend long beyond the trying times of today. Please feel free to contact us for your specific needs, and allow us to provide up-to-the-minute insights, solutions, and innovations.