💰Affordability Introduction and Use Case [live edit]

API Calls for collecting and summarising personal bank account information. Gathr primarily collects and summarises transactional data from individual personal bank accounts.

Affordability [v1] Introduction

When you are trying to determine whether or not a customer should qualify for a particular product, you may want to collect transactional data from their bank account. Furthermore, you'd probably want this information in a high-level summary that highlights the most important information (such as the main income amounts and dates as well as average incomes and expenses for a given period).

This is where you would use the API calls in the Affordability [v1] module. They will help you to paint a picture of your customers' monthly incomes and expenses, which in turn can help you to understand whether they will be able to make repayments on time or at all. You may also want to access and store a copy of customers' bank statements as a proof of their income or for record-keeping purposes.

Affordability [v1] Use-cases

Imagine you are applying for a personal loan or a new cellphone contract.

You go into a branch or start the application over the phone or online. In most cases, you get to a point where the financial service provider or network provider will require bank statements going back 3 months. You're either given an email address to send the statements to or there's a portal where you can upload them online.

You realise you don't have those statements on hand. You now need to go download them... by the time you've done so, you don't know whether you spoke to Martha or Arthur over the phone. You send/provide the statements in the agreed-upon way (probably not on the same day you started the application because...time).

Very often what will happen is that these statements will get lost in translation. You either don't send them because you forget or there's a whole lot of back and forth about whether they're the correct, most up-to-date statements, their systems are out of sync, aaaand you eventually give up.

This is where the Affordability module in Gathr becomes very useful for both the customer and the service provider. What it allows you to do is to collect this information in one of two ways:

1. Using an online login method to scrape transactions and download statements directly from the customer's account(s)

2. Facilitating a manual upload where the customer uploads bank statements which they have already downloaded from their Internet banking

3. Initiate the collection of USSD statements which are available on the customers mobile banking profile