Introduction

The Standard Financial Statement (SFS) is a key tool in assessing customer affordability during debt collection. However, as collections teams know only too well, the SFS is just the start of the affordability assessment process.

During the assessment procedure, you want to:

• Get the best outcome for every customer
• Show consistency and fairness
• Use agents’ time wisely

These goals can be tricky to meet when the number of customers who need help is increasing, financial vulnerability is rising, and customer circumstances can change and change again.

The pressures are:

• Managing inbound engagement
• Assessing and re-assessing the customer’s ability to pay
• Maintaining the paying habit
• Making it easy for the customer
• Ensuring your actions are based on accurate information

Automating the Standard Financial Statement (SFS)

What does that mean in practice, and what impact can it have on capacity, customer outcomes and baseline costs?

In many cases, automation of the SFS means a stand-alone capture form filled in by customers. A digitised paper form, if you like. And, if an agent is required to manually complete the procedure, it’s less than half the job done.

Streamlining affordability with smart decisioning

Affordability decisioning uses comprehensive data, along with your parameters, strategies and policies to generate consistently fair and appropriate outcomes without manual agent activity. All of your data sources can be instantaneously evaluated and used to produce the best outcome in line with your forbearance policy.

Using Open Banking for accurate affordability checks

Open Banking helps you get accurate information for affordability assessments by providing a real-time view of the customer's financial situation. It means customers don't have to search out old bank statements, and you don't have to rely on potentially outdated information. 

Open Banking data gives you instant verification of income, expenditure, and overall financial health. This not only improves accuracy but also speeds up the process, reducing friction for customers. The rich data provided by Open Banking can feed into your collections system, helping you understand more about your customers so you can reach fair outcomes tailored to their unique financial circumstances.

Improving customer outcomes: income maximisation and social tariffs

Once they've been through the affordability assessment, customers may be identified as eligible for sector-specific help, such as social tariffs (helping to increase take-up). Where they have no foreseeable affordability, they can be taken to a built-in income maximisation calculator to check if they are receiving all of the benefits and grants they are entitled to.

Sometimes the customer’s affordability needs to be rechecked over an appropriate time frame, triggering the SFS journey to be unobtrusively sent out again. With Open Banking’s 90-day consent policy, this step may not be needed unless the consent has expired.

Consistency and fairness

Flexys ensures fairness and consistency across all customer touchpoints by powering both self-service and agent-led journeys with the same decision engine. The platform analyses available options in real-time, presenting agents with the optimal next steps for each individual case.
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Every digital journey adapts dynamically to new information, delivering personalised experiences that require only the time and effort necessary to reach the most appropriate outcome.

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The Real Benefit

While automation and Open Banking deliver significant time and cost savings, the true value lies in ensuring timely, relevant, and appropriate engagement for every customer, every time.
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Regulatory Confidence: With regulators demanding proven consistency, Flexys provides an immutable audit trail that demonstrates fair administration of internal policies. You can confidently show that every customer receives unbiased, consistent treatment across all channels.

Operational Excellence: In today's challenging environment, where customer circumstances are increasingly unpredictable and skilled staff are scarce – collections teams need every operational advantage. Intelligent automation doesn't just streamline processes; it enables your team to deliver exceptional service precisely when customers need it most.

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Discover how our automated affordability assessment solutions can streamline your collections process.

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