NEW YORK–Consumers are sharing more personal information online than ever, but they do not want to share it with banks.
A few companies are trying to find a middle ground, helping consumers connect with lenders without exposing even basic contact information until absolutely necessary.
Google Advisor, for example, puts prospective borrowers in touch with card and mortgage lenders using a temporary email address. If a consumer ignores a lender’s pitches three times, “that email is turned off, automatically, forever,” Dan Shapiro, the Google Inc. unit’s product manager, said Sept. 21 during a presentation at the FinovateFall conference in New York.
Consumers also choose whether to contact lenders by phone. The lender never sees the applicant’s phone number unless the applicant calls first, Shapiro said.
Google also makes two mystery-shopper calls per month to lenders to make sure the rates they advertise on Google Advisor are accurate. “There’s no bait and switch,” and this further improves trust with consumers he said.
Weemba Inc., which launched its service at the conference, pairs borrowers and lenders online in a system that is “not a peer-to-peer lending platform,” said Annette Gallagher, Weemba’s chief executive.
The business model is different, but Weemba’s website looks like a P2P site.
Weemba enables borrowers to post profiles to pitch themselves to lenders, much like Prosper Marketplace Inc. and other P2P loan facilitators do. On Weemba, “borrowers are in complete control of their information,” Gallagher said. “They decide what to post, what to keep private and what to make public.”
Eventually borrowers must disclose more information to interested lenders, which use Social Security numbers and other data to run their own credit checks, but that is only after the borrowers vet the lender. Lenders must be “completely transparent” through this process, Gallagher said.
The lender pays Weemba when a borrower agrees to see its offer. It does not have a financial stake in whether the loan is approved or accepted.
Credit Sesame Inc. seems to want it both ways. It presented a credit-badge system through which it provides online icons that consumers can display to show off their good credit. The company suggests users put these badges on resumes or eBay listings to help generate trust with their audience, but it is all in the user’s hands.
“These badges are designed to be shared,” Adrian Nazari, Credit Sesame’s CEO, said during a presentation. “However, they are private by default.”
MyCyberTwin takes a different approach to generating user trust. Instead of making promises of heightened security or consumer control, the company presents an illusion. It makes lifelike digital avatars that respond to plain-language customer service inquiries online.
Users clearly are talking to a computer, even when a human model was hired to be the face of the avatar. But the illusion provides real results, said John Zakos, the company’s co-founder and chief information officer.
After implementing MyCyberTwin’s system, online sales rose from a few percentage points to up to 200%, depending on the customer and the nature of the implementation. The avatar can be a human model, a cartoon or even just text.
Sixty-five percent of consumers who interacted with the avatar said they would have otherwise made a phone call. In this way, the technology deflects costs for the call center. Banks also get copies of the transcript for business intelligence.
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