Call Credit

The Affordability Check

Make better, more responsible decisions throughout your customer management cycle

Are you making credit risk decisions on individual customers without an awareness of how serviceable their debts are, and how many times their income they owe? Are you finding that some customers fall into significant arrears after taking out new lending facilities with you? By using The Affordability Check, and combining it with CallOI (our over-indebtedness tool), you can increase your awareness of a customer’s over-indebtedness, and protect your organisation and consumers from taking new facilities which the consumer cannot afford.

What is The Affordability Check?

Following the release of the Government’s BERR report outlining its concerns about consumer over-indebtedness, the providers of the majority of consumer lending joined forces with Callcredit to launch a responsible lending initiative, which looks at consumer indebtedness.

Customer benefits

• Provides an early warning system and support for customers approaching the limits of their affordability
• Reduces inappropriate high borrowing to earning ratio
• For those customers who are not over-indebted, this additional check will improve the approval process

Lender benefits

• Supports the Government’s ‘Know Your Customer’ and ‘Treating Customers Fairly’ requirements
• Provides additional information to support responsible lending
• Allows lenders to truly review and consider affordability in their decisions without compromising their competitive positions

Key features of The Affordability Check

• The Affordability Check uses state-of-the-art web-based technology to deliver an exclusive indebtedness and affordability check quickly, conveniently and cost effectively
• Members of the Initiative share income data with Callcredit, which enables a unique method of assessing affordability
• The Affordability Check uses this data in conjunction with Callcredit’s existing shared credit data to produce an indebtedness report
• The Affordability Check provides a number of ratios for the most indebted set of consumers, which can be used to assess a consumer’s ability to repay their debt
• The Affordability Check can also provide a summary of additional, recent alerts for events which may be a potential concern for the lender
• The Affordability Check is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• The new version of the Affordability Check, 1.6 has been designed specifically for use in Collections & Recoveries

Customer Management with The Affordability Check

The Affordability Check can be used throughout the customer lifecycle, enabling you to make more appropriate decisions about your customer. Two customers may hold identical products with your organisation, but The Affordability Check provides you with the over-indebtedness dimension that will show you how they are managing their finances across the board, helping you to adapt your approach accordingly.

In situations where the consumer of concern is already a customer with the organisation, The Affordability Check provides the ability for that lender to search using the known current account details (i.e. Account Number or Reference Number), which will then generate a full indebtedness report for that individual.

Risk Assessment with The Affordability Check

• Ability to see key metrics around existing debt levels
• Comparison of customer to other consumers via intuitive traffic light system
• Single view of customer’s debt exposure across the group
• Access to information on the un-utilised limits
• Recent alert summary on highly indebted consumers

Why Callcredit?

Callcredit has an unrivalled understanding of the credit industry's needs and has developed a range of innovative information solutions. These solutions are enabling major lenders and a host of other blue chip companies to make better credit decisions, target new customers more effectively and manage existing customers more profitably.

Please note: Callcredit provide credit reports for consumers only. We can not provide credit reports for businesses.

To contact the Credit Risk team call 0113 244 1555 or email creditrisk@callcreditgroup.com