Our customers are so excited about the advantages of automating income verification that they are helping design our product, making it better for everyone. Why the enthusiasm? Because U.S. residential rental inventory approaches 44M units, each requiring several applicants, and income verifications, per year. Plus, tenants move about every three years. Verifying income is a big problem, so saving up to an hour of processing time for every one of those applications provides an enormous revenue opportunity and efficiency gain for onsite property management teams everywhere. Automating today’s largely manual process accelerates every application, elevates the accuracy and defensibility of each decision, and reduces the risk and expense of fraud.

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Enthusiasm for these benefits prompted two customers to suggest technical enhancements. One customer, a fast-growing, nationwide screening company helping property managers achieve peak efficiency, indicated that identifying and preventing duplicates in transaction history from the errant use of duplicate financial accounts in reported income would increase on-site team efficiency, and further accelerate occupancy. The second customer, a nationwide property management firm, anticipated similar benefits from detecting and preventing the inclusion of business accounts in reports illustrating accurate applicant income. Payscore pursued these ideas and, within weeks of these original suggestions, delivered updates directly meeting these requirements to the benefit of all its customers. Although they sound similar, Duplicate Account Detection and Business Account Detection, the nuances of financial records warranted different approaches to address each challenge.

Duplicate Account Detection

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When families or groups apply to rent a property, individuals generally complete their applications independently. However, a common misstep might have each party entering a shared bank account individually. Payscore draws data from multiple providers, one of the reasons for its industry-leading completion rate and collects account information in a variety of formats. These different storage schemas historically make duplicates difficult to detect. By adding an intelligent scanning layer to its analytics engine, Payscore now detects and prevents the inclusion of duplicate accounts. As a result, on-site teams are processing all their applications with greater clarity, confidence, and speed.

Business Account Detection

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One of the fastest growing income demographics in the US are individuals who are self-employed, either as their sole source of income, or to include side hustles. This makes manual processing of applications challenging because documentation such as pay stubs are sparse or even unobtainable. Some automated systems can generate falsely inflated income levels by, in essence, double counting by adding the revenue in a business account with the income in a personal account. Payscore ensures the accuracy of every applicant’s income history by properly identifying the different classes of accounts, whether personal or business. Property management companies have different policies and practices for evaluating business accounts so how these funds are assessed and reported can be configured by our customers to best suit their business requirements.