Product Updates

Simplify complex workflows with visual decisioning trees on Noble

One of the biggest challenges in managing complex financial operations is consolidating its many branches in one place. Decisioning blends data, rules, and predictive modeling to make smart decisions about who to onboard to your platform, who to qualify for credit offers, and how to monitor ongoing customer credibility. Keeping tabs of all of these individual decision components and of the varied milestones along the customer lifecycle is challenging in the absence of a consolidated view. Workflows are the decision trees that guide an entire risk management operation – containing within them the full breadth of checks built into your policies in a unified view. On Noble, workflows allow you to visualize decisioning across the entire customer journey in a single graphical interface.

Today, we are proud to announce the release of our embedded reporting

Consolidation

Visualize your business flow end-to-end in a single interface rather than manage fragmented policies that represent individual steps in your customer journey.

Self-Service

Configure your risk models independently via Noble’s intuitive platform to start mapping statuses and assigning credit on your terms.

Automation

Minimize manual review case volume and reduce human error by leveraging automated decisioning for low risk cases. Save your attention for high-risk edge cases that need it most.

Consolidation

Visualize your business flow end-to-end in a single interface rather than manage fragmented policies that represent individual steps in your customer journey.

Self-Service

Configure your risk models independently via Noble’s intuitive platform to start mapping statuses and assigning credit on your terms.

Automation

Minimize manual review case volume and reduce human error by leveraging automated decisioning for low risk cases. Save your attention for high-risk edge cases that need it most.

The Workflow Builder has been our most anticipated feature release by both clients and prospects. Up until now, our users were limited to managing business flows via a series of conditionally triggered policies. There was a burning need to evolve this into a consolidated alternative that would enable clients to build more complex onboarding and ongoing monitoring flows. The Workflow Builder both addresses this and continues to push forward the self-service agenda we’ve been prioritizing in product development – equipping clients with another key tool that gives them more independence, configuration flexibility, and control over their flows.

Tomer Biger

Noble Co-founder & CEO

Building workflows one node at a time

Workflows are made up of nodes that act as the branches to a decisioning tree. Each branch determines how a specific decisioning use case should be evaluated – whether at the customer onboarding, credit evaluation, or monitoring phase of the lifecycle. Workflow decisions can be segmented into categories and risk bands; this classification can then trigger other actions or workflows.

The following are the foundational elements that make up any workflow built on the Noble platform:

Operationalize complex decisioning

Financial models are rarely simple, linear, or one-size-fits-all. Workflows on Noble support the operationalization of all.

Visual

Visualize complex logic and multi-layered conditional structures.

Flexible

Configure simple or nested conditions, and comparisons against static values or dynamic parameters.

Smart

Reduce inconclusions and error rates by driving decisioning even in cases of missing data.

Visual

Visualize complex logic and multi-layered conditional structures.

Flexible

Configure simple or nested conditions, and comparisons against static values or dynamic parameters.

Smart

Reduce inconclusions and error rates by driving decisioning even in cases of missing data.

Get started with Reporting

Noble traces every assessment run in-platform through a comprehensive audit trail that records reason for every decision made. This equips operators with full transparency into automated decision making and deep insights into the strengths and inefficiencies of their modeling and customer journey mapping.

Built for cost optimization

Data retrieval occurs gradually on the platform and is pulled sequentially. When a workflow reaches a node, only the data for that specific node is fetched. In cases where a workflow is terminated early, data used at a later stage of the flow will not be fetched for the unqualified applicant. This data fetching logic optimizes on cost by complementing the pay-as-you-go mechanism enabled with most of our data provider partners. It ensures reports are only pulled in cases where there is still value to evaluating a customer, thus reducing wasteful usage of report quotas.

Frequently asked questions

What is a scorecard?

A scorecard is a tool used to evaluate a customer’s eligibility for your financial program. It uses data from both third-party and proprietary sources, variables, and custom calculations to build models that verify customer identity, determine risk thresholds, underwrite for credit, and/or determine credit line assignment.

How do I build a credit scorecard?

How you build your scorecard will vary depending on your business objectives, internal controls, and the credit product being built. Start by clearly defining the objective of your program. Continue by mapping the different scorecard use cases needed to support operations, aligning the varied flows with the different steps of your customer lifecycle – from onboarding through to underwriting, credit assignment and monitoring. Identify the mission-critical data points needed to evaluate the eligibility threshold of customers for your different financial products. Source the data providers that can enrich your proprietary data with 3rd-party data points that fill your data gaps, giving you a more informed view of your customers’ business performance. Then, develop a scorecard framework that builds on top of your selected data mix, applying weighting and grade handling mechanisms to produce a final score.

Once you develop your model, you will need to test and validate before deploying to a live environment. You have two options at this stage: either allocate significant internal development resources to deploy your models entirely in-house, or, leverage the intuitive tools provided by a platform like Noble to simplify the scorecard building process – empowering non-tech teams to easily deploy their modeled scorecards.

What is the purpose of a scorecard?

The purpose of a scorecard is to evaluate customer eligibility for the financial product you are building. The scorecard formula applied by your business determines its risk tolerance threshold.

What are the different use cases for a scorecard?

Scorecards lie at the core of your program decisioning. They are the rules whose outputs ultimately determine eligibility for your financial product. Your program will be made up of many scorecards, accounting for varied use cases, that align with the different risk-bearing steps of your customer journey.

Broadly speaking, scorecards are built into policies supporting the following use cases:

Onboarding – verifying customer identity and credibility at the point of onboarding to your platform
Underwriting – verifying customer eligibility for credit assignment based on financial performance indicators and historical performance
Monitoring – ongoing customer management checks that detect changes to financial health or to ability to repay debt

Learn more

Can scorecards be used for non-credit programs?

Scorecards are used to power any financial program – beyond just lending. Since they assess risk at varied points throughout the customer lifecycle, they can be tailored to support the build of any digital or embedded financial product.

What is considered a good or low-risk score?

Risk ratings and scoring thresholds vary by client and risk assessing platform. At Noble, scoring scales are standardized to a range of 1-100. As you build your model in Noble’s platform, you will have the flexibility to set weights to a total of any sum. But upon sending the configuration to production, these will be set to total 100.

There is no standard range within the Noble scale that is considered good or low-risk. These are entirely customizable and subject to your interpretation. From what we’ve observed in live client programs, though, most will flag a 0-60 score as risky, 61-75 as medium risk, and 75+ as low risk.

How does scoring relate to decisioning and assignment?

Scoring determines the grade that ultimately guides decisioning and assignment for any financial product. The grade will automatically assign your customer to a risk band and route him accordingly to the rules, or scenarios, in your workflow that align with his determined profile. Scoring serves as the basis for rejection or approval decisioning, and for assignment of credit where offered.

Frequently asked questions

What is a credit workflow?

A credit workflow concentrates credit management policies, tasks, and decisions along the customer lifecycle into a single digital work process. It is an operational tool that tracks and reports on every customer decisioning instance, from onboarding through to monitoring.

What is the relationship between scorecards and workflows?

Scorecards are individual evaluation components. They produce a single numerical grade that positions customers relative to internal benchmarks, and offer a layered, nuanced format for evaluation through which rules can be normalized (to fit a certain scale) and weighted (to reflect each rule’s importance in the scorecard).

Workflows are more dynamic evaluation tools that are built modularly to support complex decisioning. They are built from unlimited nodes and components that define the actions to be taken at any decisioning instance. Nodes can contain predefined scorecards within them; scores from these are utilized as inputs for decisioning or for segmenting customers according to risk bands, and trigger the execution of correlated corresponding actions.

Workflows are mature tools that support end-to-end decisioning throughout the customer journey. Scorecards, on the other hand, do not enable the embedding or triggering of other decisioning components like workflows. When used together, scorecards and workflows deliver the ultimate flexibility in decisioning design.

Why should I leverage a decisioning engine to power my embedded finance programs rather than build in-house?

When considering how to implement embedded financial programs, platforms are faced with a dilemma of choosing to build a decisioning engine in-house or to source one from a third-party vendor. Building, maintaining and scaling these operations in-house is complex, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on advanced development resources. Since domain knowledge is maintained by tech-savvy implementers, models cannot be easily reproduced or iterated on, and cross-organization transparency into decisioning is limited.

Combining internal controls with a third-party decisioning engine like Noble’s offers an alternative way to power embedded programs. In leveraging plug-and-play tools and visualizations like workflows, such engines empower non-tech stakeholders to build robust models faster, to adapt to changes and evolving business needs, and to gain full visibility into reason behind every automated decision made.

What workflows do I need to set up an embedded financial program?

The workflows needed to support an embedded financial program will depend on the products you’re building, the various steps of your customer journey, and on your risk modeling.

Typically, they cover customer journey phases such as customer onboarding, underwriting (if offering credit), and ongoing monitoring. When building workflows, you have the option to either:

Build all decisioning instances across the customer lifecycle into a single workflow
Create separate workflows to represent each key step in your customer journey

How can workflows be leveraged in risk operations?

Workflows provide a standardized framework to configure and execute on your risk policies. As such, they guide your entire risk operations — enabling you to determine how to review applications, how to segment customers, and what automated actions to take according to categories and risk bands.

Leveraging workflows will help you:

Unify risk policies across the entire customer journey
Reduce manual review cases and risk of human error by automating decisioning
Dedicate more time and resources to your core business
Deliver a better customer experience by increasing the accuracy and speed of decisioning