What is Relationship Awareness?
The PrecisionLender Relationship Awareness module allows you to feed relevant account data for loans, deposits and other fee-based business directly into PrecisionLender from your core system or other systems. PrecisionLender computes the current profitability (we call it Strategic Value) of each account and of the entire relationship. This allows your lenders to then price new opportunities within the context of this Strategic Value so that you will know:
- Where you stand today with a particular client
- What things will look like if you win the business in front of you
- What things will look like if you lose
See Understanding Relationship Impact for more information.
How does our data get into PrecisionLender?
Our team handles most of the heavy-lifting during the setup phase for the Relationship Awareness module. We will work with your team using your existing, in-house reporting tools, to develop a few reports that will be used to generate simple delimited text files as output. These files are then used to feed your relationship data into PrecisionLender using our secure data upload tool on a scheduled basis (usually weekly).
Who, on our side, will be working with the PrecisionLender team to create our data files?
Who is your go-to person when your Board requires a new report and it must be correct? That is usually the individual best suited to create the data files for PrecisionLender. In our experience, this individual is familiar with both your report writing tools and your core system, and can readily extract the specific fields we require.
How long does it take to set up the Relationship Awareness module?
Timing is dependent on bank resources, data location/availability and data set size. Many of our clients can create reports in as little as 5 days, but for others, the process can be more involved. From there, the PrecisionLender team will begin working with your data to ensure that it is properly mapped into the application. This will likely be an iterative process and timing will be dependent upon client specific complexities and requirements.
Additionally, IT resources will need to be available for the technical portions of RA which can take 1-2 hours if you install our executable to push your data or approximately 2 weeks if you develop against our API.
What core systems do you work with?
The data fields that we require are very common and are found in every core system. As a result, we have successfully implemented Relationship Awareness across a variety of core systems for every customer who has desired it.
Does PrecisionLender store sensitive PII data about our customers?
No. The PrecisionLender Relationship Awareness functionality does not require account numbers, CIF numbers, or Tax ID numbers.
What PrecisionLender DOES require is ability to link an incoming relationship to its accounts and the ability to reliably update relationships and accounts from week to week as you upload data. To do this, PrecisionLender uses database 'keys' (simple data fields) which are unique identifiers that exist in our system that allow us to make these connections from relationships to accounts, and from data one week to data the next week. Your internal core systems may use sensitive information to represent these database keys. However, PrecisionLender simply requires that these keys have the following two properties:
- The keys must be unique for both relationships and accounts. No two accounts may have the same key. Likewise, no two relationships may have the same key.
- The keys must be persistent over time. We must be able to know that an account (or relationship) you are sending us already exists in our system so that we can track it over time.
Regardless of what you provide as the key, our secure data upload tool will perform a salted, one-way cryptographic hash on these key fields rendering them unreadable and unusable for any other purpose outside of PrecisionLender. Once hashed, there is no way to work backwards to extract the original value. Only this hashed value is uploaded to PrecisionLender.
Examples of key fields in use within our client base:
- Real Identifier - Our upload tool hashes these values before they leave your network.
- Pre-Hashed Identifier - Client hashes the identifier before they are placed into the data files (related article).
- Synthetic Identifier - Client supplies a non-sensitive identification field from core system or data warehouse that maps directly to the Relationship or Account in question.
What is the recommended practice for providing key identifier fields for Accounts and Relationships?
Since PrecisionLender does not require real account or relationship identifiers, our recommended best practice is to provide a Synthetic Identifier to allow us to track and link these entities. See the section above detailing the requirements of uniqueness and persistence.
As more banks adopt systems that track accounts and relationships using Synthetic Ids (e.g. data warehouses), this is becoming more commonplace with PrecisionLender Clients.
How do we know our data is secure?
PrecisionLender has implemented extensive controls designed to ensure the highest level of Security and Confidentiality for our client's data during setup, testing, and production phases of Relationship Awareness.
Azure was selected as PrecisionLender's Platform as a Service (PaaS) because Microsoft is a leader in creating robust online solutions that are designed to protect customer privacy. Azure meets a broad set of international, industry-specific, and country-specific compliance standards, including:
- Australia CCSL, APRA
- FedRAMP
- HIPAA/HITECH
- ISO-IEC-27001
- Singapore MTCS
- SOC 1, and SOC 2, and SOC 3
- UK G-Cloud
For additional information regarding PrecisionLender's Information Security Management System and Compliance Program see the following article:
How does PrecisionLender use the data?
PrecisionLender uses the data to calculate both a Strategic Value and a Funds Transfer (FTP) Value. Strategic Value is what your customer banking relationships would be worth if all of their active accounts were to be re-priced today. This is what that business is worth to your competition. This context helps your lenders in pricing the opportunities that are in front of them, because they can see in real-time the value an existing customer relationship has, and how that relationship will be impacted by the new business being priced.
How frequently does our data get updated?
Your institution sets the frequency of the data push to PrecisionLender, but most of our clients find that a weekly data refresh is sufficient for their needs. It’s all included as part of licensing the Relationship Awareness module, so there are no extra charges no matter how frequently you update your information. We monitor each data refresh and contact you if we ever see anything that needs additional attention.