Case study from November 2021
With around 1,600 employees and over 200,000 members, Berliner Volksbank is one of the largest cooperative banks in Germany. Its focus is on the regional economy, especially Berlin's lively start-up scene.
Berliner Volksbank would like to streamline the administrative workload of its application portfolio and, in particular, user administration. The high processing effort for obtaining current balance sheet or sales figures in the retail business is to be automated. In addition, the bank is aiming for a sustainable improvement in data quality and thus risk assessment. The information should be available without delay via the core banking system agree21.
Why SCHUFA?
SCHUFA credit reports and subsequent notifications have proven their worth in the private customer business and are therefore to be expanded to include B2B credit reports. A further criterion: in addition to the original information on the company, liquidity information on owners and authorized representatives is included in the credit reports, thus increasing their informative value. Furthermore, SCHUFA is the only provider of a direct B2B interface to the core banking system agree21, from which Berliner Volksbank has also benefited since October 2019.
Before the SCHUFA credit reports were integrated into agree21, employees of Berliner Volksbank obtained the information via SCHUFA Web and stored it in the electronic customer file. The monitoring of customers in the retail business was carried out in the agree standard, in particular through the behavioral rating. However, this data was only available after a certain observation period and only took into account information from payment and usage behavior. General payment behavior, e.g. the utilization or exceeding of payment terms and defaults by third parties, was not taken into account. This information gap had to be closed with the B2B information.
With the introduction of the corporate customer rating, the bank gained access to automated SCHUFA credit reports and score values, including credit assessments: Information that is particularly useful to the bank in standardized credit processes.
Before the information could be retrieved automatically, there was a central one-off effort for administration in the core banking system and for the assignment. New customers are automatically transferred to SCHUFA monitoring via the full credit report and customer creation in agree21. The comparison is carried out using an IDA standard evaluation, which also initiates the import after approval. If the contents of the information are also obtained in file form, individual solutions are also possible for the evaluation and further processing of the data and the import of changes via aCI-Batch.
By using SCHUFA credit reports as the bank standard, the bank has standardized its information procedure in line with its objectives: Data is automatically requested and provided in the core banking system without media discontinuity. The information can be used in a variety of ways for data quality measures and for updating customer data, which relieves the burden on both sales and operations and creates new capacities. The bank achieved a significant improvement in the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) in particular with the balance sheet and turnover figures from the SCHUFA credit reports. The integration into agree21 and the modeling of corresponding processes with a high degree of automation have significantly reduced processing times.
The data also proves to be an indispensable source of information in the customer acceptance process. Offering new customers and existing customers with credit balances all of the bank's services, including working capital lines, credit cards and direct debit lines, in a timely manner is a competitive advantage for the bank. Whereas relevant data on new customers was previously only used on an ad hoc basis, it is now kept up to date fully automatically and without media discontinuity by means of monitoring and can be systematically evaluated at any time. The additional monitoring generally ensures that the information is up to date and replaces manually initiated processes for updating or monitoring.
High level of automation
Current data
Easy handling
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