Meet Ben - Infinian Commercial Director

As a trusted partner to some of the largest data companies and credit bureaus in the world, Infinian aims to empower businesses by giving them unparalleled insights into their customers.

Insights such as vulnerability, affordability, credit risk and more are captured using Vision, Infinian’s specialist consumer-credit-focused database. This helps businesses understand their customers better, which can lead to positive customer outcomes and even an opportunity to gain a distinct advantage over competitors.

In order to provide such a valuable service, Infinian requires talented individuals to lead the way and look for more ways that we can harness customer data in order to create lasting value. One of those individuals is Ben Allott, our Commercial Director, who is based in Alderley Park, Cheshire.

Ben Allott has been with Infinian in the role of Commercial Director for more than 4 years. Previously Ben worked in the data industry for over 16 years, in a number of varied roles with CRA’s and fintech start-ups.

He started out with a debt collection and fraud prevention business where he ran the banking section, making a name for himself to the extent that he was head hunted by TransUnion, previously known as Call Credit.

Carving out a solid reputation in the alternative credit sector of the business, he then decided to found his own data and consultancy business called Forwardice Ltd, which then lead to him becoming one of the founding directors of Hello Soda with offices in Bangkok, Adelaide and the UK.

Ben joined Quint Group and quickly developed Infinian into an expert in Collections & Tracing, Credit Risk, Fraud & Financial Crime Prevention and Vulnerability & Affordability in a post-GDPR world. The business grew into a larger entity due to the utilisation of third-party data sets, and eventually started delving into Macroeconomic & Financial trends in order to find further value for businesses.

Finding the value in the data

The whole ethos for Infinian and the main aim for Ben is to extract value from available data sets that, on the whole, will either make money for a business or save them money in the long run.

Essentially it is about helping businesses find better customer outcomes whilst helping vulnerable customers avoid financial difficulty. Analysing data sets and propping them up with third-party data sets allows for a holistic view of customers so conclusions can be drawn about them and subsequently highlighted to avoid any negative or undesirable situations arising.

The process usually starts with Ben and the other talented individuals at Infinian building a proof of concept before presenting it to an existing business, usually in the gaming, financial or collections industry. This consultancy process that Infinian provides, extracts relevant value from data sets that Infinian already has access to.

One of the success stories from this process has been Boyle Sports, a responsible gaming business who wanted to better understand their customers. Infinian provided financial vulnerability indicators to build score models and highlight problem customers who might be getting into unwanted financial difficulty.

By allowing Boyle Sports to check their customers’ affordability, they were able to illustrate this to the gambling commission and stop vulnerable customers, avoiding financial difficulty altogether.

Affordability to Vulnerability

With Ben having a great deal of experience in the data industry, within different guises, he has been able to follow the most recent trends that tend to be highlighted and focused on by regulators.

One of these is the transition happening from Affordability to Vulnerability, as there is more of an emphasis on the latter that has grown over the last few years, especially from the perspective of regulators. In Ben’s experience, vulnerability is now starting to take the limelight, and will do so for perhaps the next 2-4 years.

Put simply, a business must identify the most vulnerable customers before they slip into financial difficulty. This can be based on certain triggers that can only be found when analysing multiple data sets, such as a person making multiple unsuccessful searches, employment status, marital status, and dependents. Equally, you do not want someone claiming they are vulnerable when they’re not, leading to more problems for a business.

Thankfully, Infinian is ideally placed to help find problem customers by using matrix look up tables that can work across demographic data within the UK. They include a database of 1.5 million individuals that is refreshed every 3 months in order to keep the data relevant. With access to these insights, it makes Infinian an invaluable partner when it comes to dealing with identifying vulnerable, or not so vulnerable customers.

Alternative data sources

The other major challenge that Ben has had to deal with is preconceptions of where a business should get their data from. Traditionally, businesses have used the largest, well known data companies, on the basis that they are the largest and will therefore provide the most value when analysing their customers.

However, this isn’t always the case and can actually lead to many drawbacks. The first of which is that many of these larger businesses aren’t able to stay as agile, in that they often have data sets that are unreliable, meaning they cannot always be relied upon and do not give the most accurate reflection of customer habits. With Infinian refreshing their data sets in real time, it means they can constantly stay ahead and provide data sets with much more value.

The other downfall of these larger data businesses is that they don’t make the most of alternative data sources. For Infinian, the more data you have access to, the better, in that you can get a more holistic view of customers and accurately assess vulnerability, leading to better decisions. By neglecting alternative data sets, larger businesses end up providing a ‘tunnel vision’ assessment of customers, whilst also charging a small fortune for the benefit.

Positive Outcomes

As a Commercial Director for Infinian, Ben Allott is at the forefront of industry trends and is highly skilled in finding the value in data and passing it on to businesses. This is something he has only gained through extensive experience in the industry and continues to provide value for businesses looking to understand customer behaviours on a deeper level. It is this understanding that offers a clear advantage over competitors and can lead to positive outcomes in the future.

If you would like to find out how Infinian can help your business, get in touch with Ben today via email or connect with him via LinkedIn. You can also find our more about Infinian by heading to the website.