Panel: real-time income and employment data — from optional to mandatory?

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Aire Life

5 min readSep 27, 2021

Aire joined Argyle, Moves Financial and Prosper to debate the relevance of real-time employment data. Read on to find out how it unfolded.

The working lives of US consumers are changing. The traditional methods for lenders to understand them are no longer effective.

But when it comes to income assessment, the market that lenders must navigate to improve their own decisioning frameworks is similarly complex.

So — where should financial institutions focus their attention? And is real-time income and employment data the key to this upgrade?

The discussion

Hosted by LendIt Fintech’s Peter Renton, Aire’s VP Commercial, Mark Dreux, joined panelists from both lenders and leaders in this space:

Shmulik Fishman from Argyle
Matt Spoke from Moves Financial
Haiyan Huang, Head of Credit Risk at Prosper

Shmulik from Argyle opened the debate, explaining Argyle’s solution to operate like a train network: consumer permissioned, real-time data is submitted through Argyle’s ‘network’ to provide granular, up to date information to Argyle’s clientbase.

Introducing Aire, Mark explained:

‘We use first-party data to help lenders get confidence in stated income.’

The value for lenders

Turning to Haiyan, Head of Credit Risk at Prosper, Peter dug into the value of real-time income and employment information for lenders: ‘how is this data changing underwriting for a business like Prosper?’

She underlined its importance in two key areas: underwriting and fraud detection.

‘It definitely has a big impact’.

‘Having the ability to access real-time, accurately verified income or employment status data will reduce friction for good customers and then control credit or fraud risk for us [Prosper].’

The Aire difference

Seen by the panel as uniquely placed in the market, Mark followed on the discussion by explaining Aire’s offering in comparison to Argyle.

‘We’re going after the same problem but we’re going after it differently.’

Aire starts with consumer insight to give lenders confidence in stated income.

Mark explained:

‘We start with a list of job titles — which are constantly improving depending on vertical. Then a series of market insights we’ve built interact together — job title, zip code, time on job. So if someone comes to a lender and declares their income, Aire can provide confidence to that lender that this is inside a legitimate range for that person.’

When questioned on the relevance of geography, Mark made clear this addition: ‘Aire can provide geographically based confidence based on job title itself.’

|Find out more about Aire’s approach to stated income here.

Mark also mentioned other areas of interest for Aire: such as velocity, (e.g. a specific job title will have a different trajectory for earnings over time) and job title elasticity (e.g. replacement of income: how long might it take that employee, in that industry, to get another job?)

The Work Number

One of the more established solutions used to verify an individual’s employment data has traditionally been The Work Number — a subsidiary of Equifax. It is currently thought to cover around 30% of the US workforce.

Shmulik from Argyle explained this to require a social security number and birth date from the consumer, something he sees as ‘very personal information and the bar to declare it is very high’.

The focus for Argyle is different: ‘this data is owned by the consumer — we are data custodians only.’

Opening up access to credit

Peter then posed to the panel the theme of inclusivity — are new data sources likely to be responsible for opening up access to credit for the US workforce?

The panel agreed.

Hyan positioned the value of alternative data sources from the perspective of opening up credit access for everyone: ‘all this could allow us to give credit to more people because we have a fuller picture of their capacity to pay.’

Whereas Matt from Moves Financial framed this around his company’s own mission: to celebrate gig workers and the legitimizing of this way of working.

Despite 30–40% US workers now classified as gig workers, he stated ‘the systems that exist around how we lend and bank have not caught up with how we work today.’

From Aire, Mark added that there is no 100% effective income answer to expanding access to credit: ‘what we want to focus on is the people who need it, but aren’t necessarily able to get it.’

Impacting the bottom line

Hyan underlined that creating a holistic view of any consumer is not a simple problem to solve. The relevance of real-time data within that decisioning framework however she saw as crucial, directly translating to lender profitability:

‘It definitely impacts our bottom line. If we use this data properly, we can drive higher conversion. It can also improve decision efficiency reducing operational cost — and, if we catch something suspicious, we can reduce credit or fraud loss.’

‘There is no single solution’

Hyan emphasised the importance of lenders building out a network of income solutions — based on the needs of an individual consumer.

She also stressed the importance of coverage: ‘how many US consumers can we cover and how frequently are they updated? And can the source cover multiple employers for gig economy workers?’