In the year since COVID-19 lockdowns began in the U.S., customer complaints reveal the ongoing impact of the pandemic and its economic fallout on customers. With the PositivityTech® Intelligent Platform, customer complaint data captures this reality and presents critical opportunities for banks and credit bureaus to repair practices.

Problem 1: Health impacts finances

As early as April 2020, customer complaints, like the one below, began to reveal the impact of their health stress on their financial stress. This impact continued to grow, with complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau increasing by almost 54% in 2020, according to their recently released annual report. With PositivityTech, we identified that COVID-19-related complaints also continued to increase throughout 2020 and are continuing in 2021.

Sample customer complaint: “I was admitted to the hospital in XXXX. Not only did I have the XXXX and was in the hospital for a long time, I lost my job. I spoke with XXXX and was advised my payments were deferred until XX/XX/2020. I get a credit alert and they have reported me as past due. This is a VIOLATION OF THE CARES ACT AND THE LATE PAYMENT NEEDS TO BE REMOVED!… I was told I was provided protections under the CARES ACT and they failed to adhere to what was offered to me!”

Problem 2: Payment deferrals are not a long-term solution

With many Americans furloughed or unemployed due to the pandemic, banks offer temporary forbearance or forgiveness programs to ease the financial pressure of payments due on loans. Yet, ultimately, are these programs helping customers?

a. When payments were due three months later, customers approved for these programs were often unable to pay.

Sample customer complaint: “My husband recently passed. I am presently in processing for mortgage assistance with my mortgage company. I requested a forbearance because I had been affected by Covid-19. My mortgage company is giving me a hard time even though President Biden has signed an executive order for foreclosures to be put on hold. My property is set for foreclosure sale… I need Help.”

b. Forbearance approvals were misreported, causing delinquencies and plummeting credit scores. Until these issues are repaired, they will create another level of hardship for customers seeking credit.

Sample customer complaint: “I have attached for reference the Forbearance Agreement dated XXXX/2020 along with the Forbearance Letter confirming the forbearance was granted dated XXIXX/2020. This letter specifically states the following – you are not required to make any payments during the forbearance. The three bureaus are reporting the lates in error and it is seriously harming my credit score. These line items need to be removed and/or updated to report accurate information. It is a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to not report accurate information on a credit report.”

Problem 3: Credit bureaus’ inaccurate data is affecting economic recovery

The ongoing problems within credit bureau reporting will continue to create disruptions for economic recovery. Credit bureaus are the central repository of information that all consumers and companies alike depend on, and their veracity is assumed.

“The pandemic has been among the most disruptive long-term events we will see in our lifetimes. Not surprisingly, the shockwaves it sent across the planet were felt deeply in the consumer financial marketplace,” CFPB Acting Director Dave Uejio said in a press release.

Steps Toward Recovery

Using the PositivityTech platform, banks and credit bureaus can see the impact of the pandemic on their customers, and can work together to fix these issues.

You can uncover what your customer complaint data reveals about the risks ahead.

You can understand how to solve the issues your customers are facing.

You can act upon the insights your own data highlights.

Send me an email to gain access to PositivityTech.

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What exactly is monetary relief and when do financial institutions provide it to consumers?

Monetary relief is defined as objective, measurable, and verifiable relief that is provided to the consumer as a direct result of the steps taken or that will be taken in response to a complaint. As of December 2020, CFPB public enforcement actions have resulted in over $12.9 Billion in total consumer relief and fewer than 5% of CFPB customer complaints are resolved with monetary relief. As the new CFPB director focuses on consumer fairness and financial inclusion, how should financial institutions expect monetary relief to play a role?

Acting Director of the CFPB Dave Uejio recently shared one major focus when he stated, “I am going to elevate and expand existing investigations and exams and add new ones to ensure we have a healthy docket intended to address racial equity. This of course means that fair lending enforcement is a top priority and will be emphasized accordingly.”

The PositivityTech® intelligent platform enables you to identify and understand drivers to your biggest pain points — including areas that are not easily found nor analyzed — and can cost you the most. In this case, PositivityTech has identified the small percentage of customer complaints resolved with monetary relief, and can recommend proactive management actions to address these pain points. These actions result in better customer treatment, adherence to regulatory and legal requirements, and improvements in overall business performance.

PositivityTech’s proprietary Severity Score and Bias Index demonstrate:

• The majority of complaints resolved with monetary relief score in the higher deciles of the PositivityTech Severity Score, indicating severe customer frustration.
• The Bias Index for complaints resolved with monetary relief is 50% higher than all other company responses to consumers, indicating higher discrimination risk.

Exploring Monetary Relief by Product

Customer complaints resolved with monetary relief are concentrated in the following products:

During the last 90 days, the most significant increase in monetary relief can be found in the money transfer and virtual currency products. The following excerpt from a customer complaint related to money transfer sheds light on the problems that customers face. This customer’s complaint had a high Severity Score and was resolved with monetary relief:

“…I was informed by X that they were closing my account from sending and receiving money anymore and any money in my account will be locked for 180 days. This is unfair and I was given no reason other than what seems to be because my mom was sending me large amounts of money to cover my expenses…”

Exploring Monetary Relief by Issue

Customer complaints resolved with monetary relief are concentrated in the following customer-stated issues:

The PositivityTech proprietary Early Warning Triggers highlight issues to pay attention to. The following two issues triggered are two of the issues that lead to monetary relief resolution.

Competitive Benchmarking: Exploring Monetary Relief by Financial Institution

By comparing different institutions and the percentage of their customers’ complaints resolved with monetary relief, PositivityTech identified that:

• One financial institution (Bank A) resolves more of its complaints with monetary relief consistently than any other institution.
• Digital banks, payment companies, and fintechs are increasingly resolving their customers’ complaints with monetary relief.

Identify and Prevent Complaints that Lead to Monetary Relief

PositivityTech gets deep inside the pain points that cost you the most and reveals where you should take action. By turning your customer voices into data, PositivityTech enables you to:

• Proactively identify which products and issues lead to monetary relief and understand why monetary relief is provided.
• Prioritize actions to prevent customer frustration and to prevent monetary relief payments.
• Compare your complaint resolution outcomes with other institutions across the industry.
• Change policies and procedures to positively impact your bottom line.

With PositivityTech, find out where you stand and take action to improve practices that lead to monetary relief. To learn more, please reach out to me at Marcia.Tal@PositivityTech.com. I look forward to helping you turn negatives into positives.

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Wishing you a year that’s better than the last, filled with health, happiness, and deep listening — to ourselves and to those around us.

This year, we have all experienced many challenges. As we continue to witness life’s fragility, we are focused on helping companies gain resilience by listening to their customers’ voices. We are proud that our innovations have garnered much attention, and we thank you for being part of our journey.

1. Bias Index: Identifying Discrimination In Our Institutions

Our purpose has always been to ensure that customers’ voices are heard and that companies use their customers’ voices to create important changes. Long before this year, we aimed to predict and prevent bias using customer and employee narratives.

In May, we launched the PositivityTech® Bias Index, an AI predictive model that identifies prejudice within customer and employee complaints and makes it possible for financial institutions to repair products or unjust practices. A few weeks later, the world watched in horror as George Floyd was killed. As protests began, individuals shared their stories of discrimination. Companies pledged to weed out systemic discrimination, and the Bias Index found itself in the spotlight:

• Banking Dive: Former Citi executive’s AI platform identifies bias in banking
• BAI: A new way to detect bias in banking
• Money20/20 MoneyFest: How to detect bias in banking with AI
• Fintech Times: Using AI to Combat Bias: Marcia Tal on the Advantages of Identifying Bias in Customer Complaints

2. Understanding The Growing Impact Of COVID-19 On Banks And Customers

Three months into the pandemic, institutions wanted to understand what was most distressing to their customers and mitigate these issues. With more individuals publicizing their complaints than ever before, it was clear that customers were becoming frustrated.

By exploring COVID-19-related complaints using the PositivityTech platform, we found that though customers have continued to turn to their banks for support in times of crisis, their takeaways have been disappointing, which we shared in our July FrameWork. For example, customers have complained that their credit reports are adversely affected even when a financial institution agrees to a delayed payment.

The PositivityTech platform also identified that customers were incorporating language highlighted in the media in their complaints. For example, one customer used George Floyd’s powerful language to share the biases that he faced at his bank, and the current crises’ interconnected impacts on him and his family.

Do you know if your customers are expressing similar complaints? How would you respond?

3. Answering The Need For Better Complaint Categorization

As the world began to adapt to a new normal, we turned our attention to a pain point that executives shared with us both before and during COVID: the need for better customer complaint categorization, which enables them to address root causes. We released PositivityTech’s Categorization solution to bridge the gap between the issues that customers select and what they actually say.

4. Announcing The Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports

With the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine underway, companies are now focused on their reset, which will be rooted in data and analytics. Just last month, we launched The Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports, which measure banks’ complaint share relative to other banks. By ingesting customer narratives and extracting critical intelligence, the benchmark report reveals where you’re leading and where you might be losing your edge. The benchmark shares data about your shifting space, including:

• Comparisons across products and companies,
• The severity of banks’ complaints,
• Leading indicators of environmental risks,
• Potential for bias,
• The impact of COVID,
• And important changes over time.

5. Purpose-Driven Leadership

As 2020 ends and 2021 begins, we have reason to be cautiously optimistic. Companies are making changes to combat discrimination, listen to their customers’ voices, and elevate the voices of diverse, purpose-driven leaders. Throughout these uncertain times, we have been proud to share our expertise and knowledge with global institutions, media outlets, and women mentees in the data analytics and financial sectors.

• Citi Alumni Network: From Creating Citi’s Decision Management to Amplifying Consumer Voices Across the Industry
• Money20/20 MoneyPot podcast: PositivityTech and Analytics-based Leadership
• Authority Magazine: Women Leading The Finance Industry: “Responsible borrowing is fine” With Marcia Tal of Tal Solutions

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, and safe holiday season. In 2021, my hope is that we all turn negatives into positives.

“The world is full of what seem like intractable problems. Often we let that paralyze us. Instead, let it spur you to action.” — Melinda Gates

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Which competitors do you track daily? Which companies in your space are gaining an unexpected edge? Today, we’re thrilled to announce the Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Report ©, a brand new category of competitive intelligence based on customer narratives, which measures your “complaint share” relative to a benchmark group and the industry. Unlike other reports, the Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Report features:

• A new category of competitive benchmarking, based on your customers’ narratives
• Customized logic for creating institutions’ benchmark groups
• Market comparisons across companies and products over time
• Industry and market trends based on customers’ voices

Uncovering new competitors in our new reality

COVID-19 has transformed our world, and with it, your market share has changed, too. While 2019 saw stability, external events from the pandemic in 2020 have led to major changes across the industry.

Our proprietary tools ingest customer narratives and extract critical intelligence, making it possible for the Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports to reveal the information that institutions need to know about their shifting space. The report highlights comparisons across products and companies, the severity of your complaints, leading indicators of environmental risks, potential for bias, and the impact of COVID — and shows important changes over time.

• Severity Score: Identifies severe complaints and future risk based on customer narratives.

• Bias Index: Identifies prejudice within customer and employee complaints and makes it possible to prevent systemic discrimination.

• Trigger Notifications: Algorithms that reveal leading indicators of environmental risks to enable preemptive management actions.

How to use Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports

When you can identify and understand the specific problems described in your customer complaints as compared to your competitors’, you can predict future risks and reveal unexpected opportunities that keep your institution ahead of your competition. There are multiple applications for competitive intelligence derived from your customers’ narratives, including:

• Internal improvements in processes, features and product development
• Competitive opportunities and threats
• External monitoring and strategic investments

With the Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports, you will be able to:

1. Identify your partners’ customer pain points in order to improve your collaboration

While partners bring innovation, expertise, scale, and speed to market into products and processes, they also can introduce risks. It is incumbent on your institution to understand and monitor your partners’ customer voices. Evaluating their customer complaints provides you with additional monitoring capabilities.

2. Pinpoint COVID-19 issues, complaints, and resolutions

With PositivityTech^® “keyword intelligence” from COVID-19-related customer complaints, you can identify major issues with which your customers are struggling, see how well your institution is resolving issues compared to your competitors, get ahead of future issues, and help your customers through difficult times.

3. Identify changes over time

Every institution can pinpoint another company that may not have seemed like a threat at one point, but then made inroads into their market share. For example, a recent article in Forbes discusses how Chime is currently leading with a 35% share of digital bank checking accounts, as compared to Ally Bank’s 9% share.

With the Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports, you will be able to:

4. Uncover your “complaint share”

Monitoring your “complaint share,” a new variable that showcases your customer complaints and competitors’ customer complaints, can protect you from major risks. You can measure your “complaint share” relative to the benchmark group and the industry, track its changes over time, and understand where to apply your attention.

Subscribe to Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports

What is your “complaint share”? In today’s fast-changing world, you need to know. You do not want to be surprised when a competitor eases into your leading position. Our cutting-edge Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports will give you the critical information to understand where you’re leading and where you might be losing your edge.

Subscribe to our Inside PositivityTech Benchmark Reports now to see how your institution compares to others, based on intelligence from customer narratives. Please email me at marcia.tal@positivitytech.com to gain access to these reports.

Wishing you and your families a happy and healthy Thanksgiving!

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With the news cycle especially intense this year, headline items are impacting many of us personally — and its effects are trickling into our institutions, too. Using the PositivityTech^Ⓡ platform, institutions are finding that their customer complaints focus on the current economic, social, and health crises — and display interconnected impacts. This critical information can be used as business intelligence when making decisions.

A Web Of Interconnected Issues

An analysis of 17 large financial institutions, which we’ll call the targeted subset, revealed the following interconnected effects on customers complaining to the CFPB.

Economic Impact: Percentage of customer complaints related to the economic impact of COVID-19 within the past year

• Targeted subset: 10%
• All financial institutions: 2%

Health Impact: Percentage of customer complaints that include issues about health, health insurance, or medical conditions within the past year

• Targeted subset: 3%
• All financial institutions: 4%

Social Impact: Percentage of customer complaints that individuals chose to make public within the past year – a trend that is increasing during the crises

• Targeted subset: 43%
• All financial institutions: 38%

Now, let’s look at how customer complaints highlight, in their own words, these crises’ negative impacts on their customer experience:

A Customer Complaint About The Economic Crisis

“Due to COVID-19, I am currently laid off… and requested assistance from XX. I asked them to defer payments as per PA Cares. They refused assistance, just kept asking for payments. They showed no empathy and did not even ask how I was affected.”

With economic stimulus payments, deferrals, and forbearance programs skewing credit scoring algorithms, financial institutions are actively looking for alternative data sources to inform their credit decisions. Customer complaints like this one are viable data sources, which are currently underutilized by banks.

A Customer Complaint About The Health Crisis

“I was laid off from work when I was hospitalized. When I was well enough, I reached out to XX to explain and notify that I have missed the payment due to being in a COVID-19 impacted area and being hospitalized and asked if I could get an extension on payments with no late fees and interest payments, which I was told would be honored, until my health insurance was being debited and the card declined due to the fact that XX charged me late fees and interest fees… and locked the card… I was extremely ill and this is the time that they chose to take advantage of me.”

With PositivityTech, banks find that complaints that mention the current crisis have especially high Severity Scores, our proprietary score that identifies severe complaints and future risks based on customer narratives.

A Customer Complaint About The Social Crisis

“My credit file was breached years ago without any compensation. I completed all the appropriate documentation and I am still trying to get my V.A. loan that I have rightly earned. Why can I not get my V.A. loan by no fault of my own? Why should my family continue to stay in a hotel since I cannot obtain one? Why will XX not take their knee off the necks of            Americans, particularly my neck? I am begging to have these inquiries, and you all will not let me breathe.  Could you all show God’s kindness to            who risked his life fighting for a country I love dearly?” 

In this complaint, the customer, who is also a veteran, has used George Floyd’s powerful language to highlight the biases that he is facing at his bank, and the current crises’ interconnected impacts on him and his family. PositivityTech’s algorithms are sensitive to the fact that financial institutions’ customer complaints reflect language highlighted in the media. The media, as we have seen, also highlights customer complaint language.

Your Customers’ Voices Are Leading Indicators

We should expect that global events will reveal their impact within our own institutions. To truly understand how our external environment is impacting your business, listen to your customers. The leading indicator is what your customers are telling you.

To explore the critical messages within your financial institutions’ complaints – and to compare them to those of other institutions, I invite you to get in touch with me at marcia.tal@positivitytech.com. Together, we can turn negatives into positives.

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