What are the benefits of using Decisioning as a Service?

In Banking, Payments and eCommerce transactions, trillions of decisions are made by these software systems to approve an application, process a payment and successfully check out a customer shopping online.

Some of these decisions need to be made quickly, accurately and the results of these decisions need to be made available to other enterprise systems for downstream processing.

One of the main benefits of using Decisioning as a Service is that the software platform is connected to a variety of data sources that can be utilized to write complex business management rules, underwriting rules and pricing rules.

The other benefit of using a Decisioning as a Service is the team’s focus. Ostensibly, the companies offering this service are experts in their fields. They may have had years of experience working with third party data providers on nuances that you might not notice and could take months to resolve and delay your product launch.

Visualization of Rules - Decisioning as a Service platforms

One of the most important aspects of decisioning and rules management is the visualization of the complexity of business rules. A good user interface and user experience for the rules management professionals is key to provide insight into how decisions are programmed and how decision paths are linked together.

Having a graphical user interface to display rule paths, end nodes of any branch and behaviors of these decision paths and connectivities to other pricing strategies will help risk and credit professionals to quickly glance at their creations and share their thoughts with their peers to accurately describe their intent. 

Data enrichment - Decisioning as a Service platforms

The second most important aspect of having a good decisioning platform is the ability to create variables and score cards without the intervention of an engineering team. The ability to create a derived variable or a custom variable right in the platform with all available mathematical operations is key to build ever more complex decisioning rules. These types of mathematical expression orchestration management tools should be part of any decisioning as a service platform.

The ability to create an unlimited number of variables from first, and third party sources without engineering intervention will speed up rules development, and expand the horizon of credit and risk professionals and give them unlimited abilities to test our new way of verifying and underwriting their consumer, small business and commercial clients.

Data connectivity - Decisioning as a Service platforms

Data is essential for decision making and it’s also true in a decisioning platform. Data could come from many different sources.

First, data could be fed through an online application via a website or a mobile application. Data could also come from an embedded application or a checkout button. Sometimes data could come from an API call stemming from another enterprise system.

Examples of this data could be identifiable information from a person, a business or a commercial entity. Other types of first party data could be a stream of payments data or some other types of metadata created by an upstream enterprise system.

The ability to allow data to be piped into a decisioning platform without engineering intervention is key to a no-code, do-it-yourself decisioning platform.

Sagemaker, Pkl, PMML, Python - Decisioning as a Service platforms

Banks have employed hundreds of data scientists with varying degrees of capabilities. There has also been an explosion of data analytic tools and platforms out there. Sagemaker, for example, is a machine learning platform and infrastructure from Amazon cloud services.

The ability to host and run Sagemaker images, Pkl, PMML and Python code to generate custom scores and probabilities is a key for any successful Decisioning as a Service platform.

Once the probability is calculated, the content of the probability needs to be stored in a variable for rule writing. The platform should provide tools for banks to manage all of these activities without having to code. 

In summary

If you are using a third party decision as a service platform, make sure it has the following:

1. All third party data providers are integrated and all you need to supply is your third party credentials.

2. All third party data and attributes are also extracted and available for you to run scores and rules

3. Rule authoring tools should be visual and provide do-it-yourself styled functionalities for the end user to write their own rules

4. The platform must provide the ability to test these rules

5. The platform also needs to provide the ability to create new derived variables and give the user the ability to enrich the data provided by third parties and first parties.

6. The platform also must have APIs and Endpoints for other enterprise systems to send in first party data and push decisions and pricing strategies back to other enterprise systems.

7. Lastly, the decision engine itself must return a decision within 1 to 10 milliseconds. 

These are just a few of the functionalities you should look out for when picking a decision as a service platform.

About LendAPI

LendAPI is the only digital onboarding platform for banks with a suite of Product Studio, Pricing Engine and Rules Studio working in concert all in one platform. Follow us on Blog, Linkedin, X, YouTube.