Incline Marketing Solutions Products and Services

Overview of Incline products and services

Incline offers the full range of services to assist an organisation to successfully and profitably grow their business.

Key to our offerings is the ability to provide the full end-to-end solution across the entire growth cycle, from sourcing of leads to analytically selecting appropriate prospects to assisting with campaign design to helping with the project management around campaigns to analysing campaign results.

We believe that the marketing process is a continuous cycle of campaigns whereby we constantly learn more about what drives the decisions of our client’s consumers and that helps us refine the customers targeted, the approaches taken and the offers made to ensure the best possible response.

Incline also offers a number of associated services including Credit Bureau Services and I.T. support for the world’s top marketing software package, Aprimo.

Incline’s vision is to help our clients continuously learn to target prospects more effectively, so that the RIGHT people are targeted with the RIGHT product in the RIGHT way. This not only assists our clients with a higher return on investment, but it also serves the community as people are targeted with offers that are specifically tailored for them.

For more information on how we can help you achieve outstanding marketing results, contact us ...

Sourcing of Leads

Incline only works with list providers that are members of the Direct Marketing Association and a proven track record of data sourcing. Incline’s primary list provider (ETL) is the only list provider in Sub Saharan Africa to have had 3 consecutive clean audits. ETL are one of the few providers who can show a full audit trail for every single record that they sell into the market.

Clients who source data through us can rest assured that the leads have all been sourced legally and are continuously and effectively enhanced and updated.

ETL has records for over 50 million individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa, including over 28 million economically active individuals in South Africa.

The true power of the ETL data lies not so much in its quantity as it’s quality. The data is regularly updated with external address updates and an entire team is focused full time on enhancing the data by

- increasing the number of addresses that are geo-coded to suburb or erf level

- creating indices that predict elements such as response rates, job stability, clustering and so on

Incline has found that these geo-coded indices have been some of our most successful predictors in work we have done with a number of our clients. The teams involved in working on these include individuals with international reputations in risk and marketing data analytics.

For more information on sourcing quality data for your company’s marketing campaigns, contact us ...

Credit Bureau Services

Incline has a strategic alliance with XDS. XDS is one of the big four bureaux in South Africa who receive monthly data updates from hundreds of credit providers on tens of millions of records from the Credit Providers Association (CPA) as well as thousands of updates from sources such as hundreds of courts, Home Affairs, the Deeds office, CIPRO and various others.

Founded in 2003, XDS is the only tier 1 South African bureaux that is 100% black owned and 100% owned by South Africans. It has achieved BBBEE level 2 and this is currently being reviewed to achieve level 1.

XDS has the most modern technical architecture in its field which has allowed it to deliver higher quality of service and products at a lower cost than its competitors. XDS is used by virtually every credit provider in South Africa across pre-vetting, acquisition, assessment, collections, fraud and tracing operations and has developed a reputation for speedy delivery, good pricing and innovative products.

XDS has also been the most successful South African credit bureaux in Africa with bureau operations in Ghana and Nigeria and has been involved in projects in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, United Arab Emirates, Australia and Namibia.

Incline Marketing Solutions and XDS have formed an alliance whereby Incline manages all XDS clients in the Western Cape and Incline’s considerable analytical expertise has been placed at XDS’s disposal.

As XDS’s agent in the Western Cape, Incline on-sells XDS products in four key areas: Trace, Credit Profiles, Authentication and Industry Benchmark Reporting. For more information on how we can help you with your credit bureau information needs, contact us ...

Tracing Services

XDS provides a number of innovative tracing tools and options to clients who wish to trace an individual - whether it is to pay them an outstanding insurance claim, contact them regarding their account or send them a final notice.

Various online tracing tools are available:

- ID number trace – get contact details for someone based on their ID number

- Address trace – get contact details for everyone who has lived at a certain address

- Telephone trace – get contact details based on someone’s telephone number – late stage collections and trace agencies have reported that 80% of the traces where they have been successful are through this as they are able to often find someone who knows how to contact the debtor.

- Account number trace – get contact details for someone based on their Account number

- Easy Trace – a tracing tool where one is able to trace debtors where very little is known about them (for example, just a name and an approximate age)

- Trace alerts – This feature allows clients to flag certain consumers so that when an update on the contactability of that consumer enters XDS through its many data sources, the client is alerted with the updated contact information.

XDS also offer batch tracing services whereby large volumes of records can be traced quickly and at a good price.

For more information on how we can help you with your tracing needs, contact us ...

Credit Profiles

XDS credit profiles are specifically designed to assist our clients in making good risk assessment decisions. These profiles contain information that credit providers to rental agents to recruitment consultants have found invaluable in making decisions about people.

The base credit profiles contain a great deal of very valuable information about the individual such as:

- potential fraud indicators (including ID verification with Home Affairs and a check against the Home Affairs deceased database)

- whether the individual has any judgements or defaults against them - with the date and amount and who loaded that judgement

- whether the individual has any adverses or administration orders against them

- all the individual's links to property via the Deeds Database

- all the individual's links to companies (directorships, etc. via a CIPRO check)

- the individual's debt review status (whether they are under debt counselling)

Those companies who are members of the Credit Providers Association (CPA) have access to additional information, including detailed information every credit account that that consumer has, the balances outstanding, whether they are delinquent on those accounts and the instalment amounts that that individual is having to cover every month. This is invaluable information when one has to determine whether someone is able to afford an additional credit product.

Credit profiles are indispensible for anyone who wishes to grant credit. Apart from the requirements of the National Credit Act to determine an individual’s affordability, companies recognise the importance of verifying the credit worthiness of an applicant before granting them credit. XDS Credit profiles are the best and most affordable way of doing this.

The XDS credit profiles are further enhanced with the XDS presage score. The presage score is a number which shows how good a customer’s credit risk is. The presage score was developed using advanced statistical modelling techniques and is considered the most predictive credit bureau score in South Africa.

For more information on how we can help you with your credit profile needs, contact us ...

Consumer Authentication

XDS has developed a unique and innovative product for the South African market that has proved itself one of the most effective means of preventing fraud (especially application fraud) in the industry. The innovative XDSAuthentication product uses a consumer’s credit history to compile a set of questions that that consumer alone would be able to answer.

For example, a fraudster could fairly easily work out where someone’s current address is but they would find it very hard to know what a person’s telephone number may have been a few years previously? Or would they know whether the individual has a FNB card account, or an RCS loan? These are the sorts of questions that the XDSAuthentication system is able to provide on individuals and through a unique 5 questions system, our clients are able to establish whether the person they are talking to is genuinely the person whose ID has been submitted or whether they are not. Those consumers that fail too many of the questions can be flagged for fraud investigations or downright declines.

The XDSAuthentication product is not only extremely quick and user friendly but is priced so that it is far cheaper to use than being caught out by even a single fraudulent application.

In addition, if one of our clients catches an individual out attempting to apply and who gets too many XDSAuthentication questions wrong, that ID is noted on the system and if that individual tries the same with another of our clients - that client would be alerted.

XDSAuthentication is the only solution available that offers our clients the added assurance that a user opening an account, making a transaction, increasing credit limit or generally accessing information is the genuine authorised user of the specified identity number. This helps them quickly assess fraud potential, detect and respond to fraud attempts, and verify identities to reduce exposure and losses.

For more information on how we can help you with your consumer authentication and fraud prevention needs, contact us ...

Industry Benchmark Reporting

As a repository of hundreds of millions of records of consumer information, XDS is in a unique position to be able to aggregate the information into views that can assist industry players to benchmark themselves against the rest of the industry (without giving away any confidential information).

Being able to see how a company compares to the overall industry in terms of its growth in accounts, change in its levels of delinquency or changes in the usage that it’s customers are making of its products is invaluable in helping that company assess its performance. They are able to determine whether what they are experiencing in terms of their portfolio performance is due to external or internal factors.

For example, if the entire industry has seen a steady improvement in 3+ cycle delinquent balances as a percent of total portfolio but an individual company has seen a worsening of the same statistic, then clearly that company has a portfolio which is bucking the industry trend and reasons can be sought for that.

XDS produces a standard set of industry metrics that any player - whether it is a furniture retailer, a bank, a clothing retailer, a personal loans company, a vehicle loans provider, or any other credit provider can benefit from. In addition, XDS has an entire team that is focused on the development and improvement of their industry reports and this team works hand in hand with clients who make use of these reports to constantly tailor their reports to get the maximum benefit.

The team that works on these reports includes people with international reputations in the risk and analytics fields and who, through their detailed understanding of the workings of the credit industry and the peculiarities and quirks of each industry type (e.g. Furniture retail vs bank cards) are able to create reports that are detailed and immensely valuable to the business owners that use them.

For more information on how we can help you with your industry benchmarking needs, contact us ...

Business Consulting

Incline Marketing Solutions combines the best of experience and intelligence to provide top class business consulting to our clients. Individuals with years of experience across risk, marketing and operations work side by side with analysts with university Masters degrees in statistics, mathematics and engineering.

Clients have found that this exceptionally high level of skill and expertise not only leads to elegant solutions to the business problems that we have assisted with, but in almost all cases, new dimensions are explored and new ideas have arisen which have led to massive business improvements.

Incline offers business consulting services across the entire spectrum of marketing and operations. For more information on how we can help you achieve outstanding business results, contact us ...

Analytical Services

Incline’s analytical teams work with the best technology and techniques currently available. Our analysts work across a variety of marketing and analytical projects and have a proven track record of extracting that rare resource - intelligence - from data and processes that previously defied understanding.

The main areas that Incline leads the analytical markets are across predictive analytics, geographical business analysis, campaign design and analysis and business reporting.

Incline has successfully deployed numerous marketing campaigns with continuously improving results. Not only have we managed to outperform a number of competing list providers and marketing companies, but we have also consistently and repeatedly beaten our own campaign results as we and our clients learn more from each campaign that we run.

Our reporting expertise has assisted our clients to get a much clearer picture of the true state of affairs with their various campaigns and use of that knowledge has allowed our clients to save unnecessary costs and get better results from the same or lower budgets.

However, the strongest weapon in the Incline arsenal is innovation. The company has placed a conscious and concerted focus on innovation - for example, each person in the company is allowed to spend half a day a week on any pet project that takes their fancy. This focus has already yielded results in some of the revolutionary offerings that are transforming the direct marketing landscape - such as making it possible to target non-bureau leads with credit offers.

For more information on how we can help you achieve outstanding business results, contact us ...

Aprimo Software

Marketing is the last business discipline which has, up until now, not had access to end-to-end automation of its business processes. Typically marketing is supported by many point solutions, and the cost of integrating these means that the functions that support marketing typically act as silos. The availability and support for the Aprimo technologies in South Africa brings the ability to change this.

Business disciplines, like Finance, Human Resources, and Manufacturing Production etc, are typically served by Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs). However the ERPs have not been purpose build for Marketing. The planning, financial, production and fulfilment processes work differently in marketing from other business disciplines. There is also the added requirement of enabling Marketing and Sales to work closely together.

The Aprimo technology set provides an integrated platform to enable the entire marketing process. Synchronising and accelerating the activities of marketing, and making marketing accountable for the investments that are made, is possible with the Aprimo technologies. Included as part of the platform is personalised one-to-one Customer Relationship Management and Database Marketing across all channels driven from a single platform.

Of course technology for marketing includes having a website, email, office automation, call centre automation, electronic bill boards and much more. However a cohesive set of business processes that turns marketing into a valued generator of qualified leads and opportunities where the above-the-line, below-the-line, one-to-one dialogue between customers, prospects, sales and marketing all work in harmony has seemed like an elusive pipe-dream. With knowledge, productivity enablers, and integration the results flow directly to the bottom line – as many of Aprimo's over 200 customers will attest.

Even more exciting for the South African market, significant portions of the technology are available on a “hosted, pay-for-use” basis.

For more information on how we can help you achieve outstanding marketing results, contact us ...