Kaja Edsberg (31) is a partner and client relationship manager at Nordic Corporate Bank. Here she describes how relevant data is a very important factor in helping new and existing customers in her working day. Risk assessment is much more than a rating, and part of Kaja's regular routine is digging deep into information to help customers find the best possible financing solution.
1. What are your most important tasks?
It has to be providing good credit facilities tailored to our customers' needs. That means getting to know the customer and understanding and assessing the risk factors in each loan, but also offering input and suggestions on structure.
Following up loans is also an important part of the working day. We mainly finance projects and transactions, and changes often come up that we as the lender need to know about and take a view on.
2. What is the biggest challenge in your working day?
My most important task, and my biggest challenge, is making a good credit assessment. Access to relevant information is essential for that, covering the past, the present and the future. Usually that means financial statements, track record, budgets, cash flow statements and more. Our customers often depend on quick answers. So it is important not to get lost in information that leads nowhere, but to give concrete feedback quickly, so the customer understands their room for manoeuvre in a potential transaction.
3. How would you like it to be?
The dream would be for someone to feed me intravenously with exactly the information I need to provide the best possible loan. That is not how it works, and thankfully so, because this is genuinely exciting and enjoyable work.
4. How do you use data from Enin day to day?
We usually ask the customer for quite a lot of information to get a complete picture of the business. We always keep a close dialogue with our customers, and we find that it is an efficient way to get clarity on a great deal, but it has to be backed up with hard facts. I find much of that information in the Enin web portal, which makes the working day simpler and more efficient for both me and the customer. That covers financial statements, history, ownership, business partners and more.
Perhaps most important of all is the efficiency Enin brings to qualitative information. Automated reading, filtering and structuring of thousands of articles beats ordinary "Googling" hands down.
At the same time, I use the Enin web portal to follow up customers and loans, so that we as a bank are on the ball and ahead of the game if other needs come up.
Enin also sends me weekly alerts on updates in Brønnøysund, such as when the annual accounts are filed. That makes follow-up easier and frees both the customer and me to focus on other tasks.
Want to know more about the data Kaja uses?
At Enin we run customer interviews continuously to map how our solutions are used. That way we can adapt to our customers' workflows, so that we keep presenting more relevant data in the best possible way.
