Should You Build or Buy a Credit Risk Management Platform?

Credit Risk & Management Platform

Creating a credit decision platform is a highly complex process. There are two options when it comes to developing credit risk management policies and infrastructure: building your own platform or buying one. Each option has it’s pros and cons.

Build

If you have the right people and knowledge, plenty of time and capital, you may be tempted to build your own platform. 

If you do opt to build, you’ll have to depend on your in-house staff to demonstrate a high level of skill, or hire talent at a competitive rate to get the task done. Finding the right combination of financial lending expert and analytics specialist can be difficult.

Once you have a team in place, the dual tasks of setting up platform infrastructure and building a policy and processes framework begins. You’ll need to be able to parse and leverage massive amounts of data to identify a pool of potential borrowers, and put a pipeline into place for validation. 

Deployment in a testing environment, troubleshooting, testing and redeployment must be repeated until the system works flawlessly, which can take months and accumulate a total cost of ownership (TCO) that devastates your CAPEX budget. If your time to market is critical, you may not have months to spare.

Buy

Since few lending companies have the bandwidth and available capacity in their IT department to take on the task of building a credit decision platform, buying a solution from a proven vendor usually makes more sense. 

Using a vendor can mean a shorter time to market and a lower total cost of ownership. The right vendor has the expertise, manpower and capability to quickly create custom platforms based on pre-existing, trusted frameworks.

Preset vendor design modules mean engineering and from-scratch coding needs are minimized, and scalability can be quickly achieved. Since there is no need to develop base code from the ground up, rapid system design is achievable.

Vendors also have predefined data sets, and can generate attributes from multiple courses, including all leading credit bureaus, fraud files, identity and DDA verification sources. This shifts the platform build away from full development and into a mapping situation, which also provides for a higher level of configuration and a faster completion. 

Unless you have nearly unlimited time and resources and are prepared to pay senior developer salaries to build your own credit risk management platform, the TCO is much more manageable if you buy instead of build. Your speed-to-market will also be positive, and you’ll experience fewer code vulnerabilities in market-tested software.

A Proven Solution for Fast Results

GDS Link offers a global decisioning platform and analytics to clients in over 36 countries. We can maintain parallel work tracks and streamline project turnaround with seamless staff scalability and 24-hour work cycles. With our solutions you can:

  • Reduce the need to hire senior developer resources
  • Speed your time to market, as time is money
  • Focus on your core competencies and portfolio management vs. building a platform
  • Reduce your overall cost of ownership for a solution
  • Partner with a trusted provider, built by credit experts for credit experts

For more information about GDS Link’s portfolio of Credit Risk Solutions and Services, visit: https://www.gdslink.com/solutions/

For further insights about GDS Link’s Analytical and Advisory Services visit: https://www.gdslink.com/services/

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