A short study: the financial facts consumers really can recall

Part two: Here Tom Oscherwitz explains the results of some recent polling — and what it indicates for the future of first-party data.

In my last blog I made a couple of predictions about the knowledge consumers have at their fingertips regarding their finances.

I argued that each of us hold certain personal financial facts that we can always recall with relative ease. At the same time, other bits of financial data may elude us entirely or trigger very inaccurate recollections.

Having hypothesized why this might be in regards to our income (such as: we pay more attention to numbers that are important to us, we are better at keeping track of consistent, slowly evolving figures and our salaries are simple and easy to remember numbers), I knew it was time I put my views to the test.

So, ahead of hosting my first Aire Talks event last week, I polled my LinkedIn audience to gather some data.

Before sharing the results, I want to acknowledge the informality of this poll: by no means is this a random sample or one that can claim to be representative of the US population.

Nevertheless, some of the findings are striking. Here are the results:

So what leading indicators for us — and more crucially — for US lenders did we identify?

• The data supports the hypothesis: there are certain data elements consumers are more likely to know with precision than others.
• It also shows us that consumers overwhelmingly claim they will disclose accurately what they know (80% of respondents said they would accurately state their income).
• The data also suggests lenders can obtain valuable insight about their customers simply by asking basic financial questions.
• And finally — with the help of better data and an insight partner (like Aire) lenders can collect, make sense of, and validate that assertion in real-time.

With first-party data, lenders can add valuable new insight into their decisioning process, and serve their consumers more fairly, more accurately and with better data than ever before.

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Coming up: we’ll be running a wider, more representative piece of research this summer to explore these themes. We’ll share those results — and how they compare to these initial findings with you soon.

Find out more about Pulse from Aire, our income validation solution that uses employment characteristics to validate the stated income of any consumer.