Are you a financial institution looking to grow your commercial credit card business?  Focusing on this market makes a lot of sense, especially with recent growth rates around 9%.  Small businesses in particular represent great opportunity for cards because these customers want fast, cost-effective financing options and the approval process for loans and lines of credit can take months – an eternity in the lifetime of a small business.   Regardless of the size business you’re targeting, balancing potential rewards with the risk inherent in taking on new accounts is tricky. With more than 100 years of experience helping our customers improve their performance, Equifax recommends two key practices:

• Identify the best businesses for your marketing efforts; and
• Maximize your ability to identify and mitigate risk.

We can help you in each stage of the acquisition process to drive more growth and build stronger customer relationships, by leveraging the powerful data and advanced decisioning technologies of the Commercial Financial Network or CFN. The CFN is an ever-expanding network of data enhanced by innovative analytics and technology. It provides organizations with secure, direct access to information on small businesses from multiple sources to help drive growth across business lines and markets.

Market Smarter

Finding the best customers for you and your products is challenging, especially when the market is so crowded with both traditional and non-traditional competitors.  Leveraging data from a variety of sources including, but not limited to risk data gives you a sustainable competitive advantage.  With data on more 28 million businesses, the CFN can help you answer questions like:

• What do my best customers look like and how can I target prospects with similar characteristics? What are the best products for these customers?
• How can I use risk data to filter customer lists so I only spend marketing dollars on the most promising (least risky) businesses?
• How do I make sure my business and contact data is both accurate and current?

Make Better Credit Decisions through Deeper Insights

Making the right decision at time of application is key to maximizing current revenue and minimizing write-offs.  We recommend using a combination of credit scores and reports to make the best decisions in the least amount of time. Scores are an efficient and cost-effective way to accurately gauge the risk of your applicant pool.  Those that incorporate recent innovations like trended commercial data and machine learning can boost your ability to predict account risk by up to 50%! 

Use more in-depth credit reports to further assess those businesses in the “gray area” of your risk tolerance - make sure you’re not passing up revenue by declining an otherwise good account that’s on the cusp of your cut-off range. With advanced tools and technology fueled by CFN data from more than 1,300 commercial payment data contributors, Equifax enables you with unrivaled insights into business risk.

To learn more about the CFN and how Equifax can help you grow your commercial card business, see our new infographic and accompanying white paper on recent innovations in risk decisioning.