Flinks Attributes: Transforming Transactional Data into Actionable Insights

Attributes is a crucial component of Flinks' data enrichment solution, designed to transform raw transactional data into real-time, actionable insights. This solution allows organizations to gain a deeper understanding of their clients' financial profiles and consumer behavior by processing, organizing, and transforming unstructured financial data.

Instead of dealing with the tedious tasks of cleaning, sorting, and categorizing raw transaction data, Flinks’ Attributes engine handles the "heavy lifting" by generating aggregated outputs—data attributes—that are immediately usable. This process involves placing categorized transactional data into a structured format, such as a pandas DataFrame, where mathematical functions, filtering, and grouping are applied to create meaningful insights.

Key Benefits of Using Attributes

The Attributes product provides significant advantages for businesses relying on customer financial data for decision-making:

1. Actionable Insights and Deep Data Flinks Enrich (Attributes) offers extensive coverage, providing clients with access to over 6,000 enriched data points and attributes. These insights reveal information about consumer behavior and financial profiles, enabling smarter decisions.

2. Enhanced Decision Making Attributes enables organizations to gain a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of a person’s financial position and consumer behavior based on up-to-date information. This depth of insight goes beyond traditional credit scores by capturing changes in recency and behavior to inform underwriting decisions.

3. Automation and Efficiency Attributes accelerates business operations by digitizing and automating repetitive data collection and processing tasks, eliminating manual labor. This automation can lead to 50–80% savings in verification costs and 30%+ faster verification and underwriting processes.

4. Customization and Control While Flinks offers standardized packages, the solution is flexible, allowing clients to define the specific data points most important to them and even create their own custom data enrichment tools.

Known Limitations

While Attributes provides comprehensive data enrichment, there are some known limitations documented in the sources:

• Webhook Delivery is Not Supported: Currently, Flinks does not support Attributes’ payloads to be delivered via webhooks. However, the webhook providing raw aggregated data can be utilized as a trigger to initiate Attributes API calls.

• Geographical Restriction for Business Analysis: The full production use-case for Business Analysis Attributes is presently only supported within the Canadian market. Clients looking to use these in the US Market must contact Flinks to be placed on a waitlist.

• Tier Restriction for All Attributes Endpoint: Access to the /GetAllAttributes endpoint, which returns all available consumer attributes, is restricted to clients who have a Tier 2 Package and above.

Attributes Packages and Capabilities

Flinks structures its enrichment offering into several Attribute packages, each tailored to specific use cases, accessible via dedicated API endpoints:

Real-Life Use Cases Benefiting from Attributes

Attributes are deployed to create meaningful outcomes across several areas of financial services:

1. Expedited Underwriting and Credit Decisioning: Financial organizations use Attributes to streamline their credit risk analysis and identify the creditworthiness of potential customers quickly. The data attributes provide an up-to-date financial picture, capturing recent behavioral changes that may not be reflected in traditional credit scores. This is critical for various lending types, including consumer lending, mortgage lending, and auto financing, enabling accelerated underwriting and confident credit decisioning. Example: A consumer lender uses Lending Attributes to assess a borrower’s cash flow, account balances, and loan repayment history to automate loan approvals and reduce time spent on manual review.
   
   

2. Instant Income and Employment Verification: Attributes analyzes transactional data to automatically differentiate between employment and non-employment income, tracks income trends, and outlines predicted payouts. This helps assess a customer’s affordability and ability to repay based on their current financial situation. Example: A financial institution uses Income Attributes to instantly verify a user’s income sources, replacing manual document review processes and saving substantial verification costs.
   
   

3. Fraud Prevention and Risk Mitigation: Attributes enables automated fraud detection by analyzing transaction history for irregular behavior patterns. The tool returns both account-level and transaction-level information, acting as a flag system to help risk experts focus on accounts that fall below a specific risk threshold, thereby limiting false positives and increasing the efficiency of investigations. Example: A financial application utilizes User Analysis Attributes to detect potential fraudulent flags, such as unusual account activity or the presence of numerous NSF fees, bolstering their onboarding and security workflows.
   
   

4. Business Underwriting: For financial services dealing with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) or corporate accounts, the platform offers the necessary insights for underwriting and operational analysis. Example: A business lender uses Business Analysis Attributes to quickly break out a user's operating expenses, revenue streams, and liability payments for a fast and efficient business loan underwriting process.
   
   

Flinks Attributes, a core component of the Flinks Enrichment solution, can be utilized in two primary ways: through direct API calls for integrated, automated processes, or through the Client Dashboard for manual review, visualization, and testing.

1. Access via Flinks API

Using the Flinks API is the method for organizations seeking to integrate attributes directly into their advanced models, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or Loan Origination Systems (LOS) for real-time, automated decision-making.

The Required API Flow

Retrieving Attributes data is dependent on completing the initial stages of the data aggregation flow, specifically capturing the necessary raw transactional data for processing.

The flow generally follows these steps:

1. Retrieve LoginId: The customer successfully connects their account via a front-end solution like Flinks Connect, generating a unique loginId. This loginId must be securely stored by the client.

2. Initiate Session (/Authorize): The client uses the stored loginId to call the /Authorize endpoint with the parameter MostRecentCached:true and a valid Authorize Token. This initiates a session and returns a new requestId.

3. Retrieve Transactions (/GetAccountsDetail): Using the generated requestId, the client calls the /GetAccountsDetail endpoint to retrieve the most recent transaction history, which the Attributes engine requires to process the insights. If the request is still pending, the API may return a 202 OPERATION_PENDING, requiring the client to handle asynchronous retrieval.

4. Request Attributes Data: Once the prerequisite data is available, the client calls the specific Attributes endpoint corresponding to the desired package using the requestId.

Attributes API Endpoints

Flinks provides multiple dedicated API endpoints depending on the required use case package:

API Limitations

It is important to note that Flinks does not support Attributes’ payloads to be delivered via webhooks. However, the webhook providing raw aggregated data can be utilized as a trigger to initiate subsequent Attributes API calls.

2. Access via Client Dashboard

For clients who prefer a no-code or low-code solution or need to conduct manual review and analysis, the Flinks Client Dashboard provides an out-of-the-box interface to visualize data, including the enriched Attributes reports.

Viewing Attributes Reports

Once a user has successfully connected their account and the Attributes package is enabled, the results are displayed as Attributes Reports within the Dashboard.

To view these reports:

1. Access the Client Dashboard's request feed.

2. Click on the user's name associated with the request.

3. On the user's detail page, the name of the enabled Attributes package(s) will be visible in the upper left area of the screen (e.g., "Overview | Income").

For advanced use cases, such as Business Analysis Attributes, the results are primarily utilized through an auto-generated report found in the Client Dashboard.

Customization via Dashboard

The Client Dashboard also includes administrative and configuration features related to Attributes:

• Transaction Adjustment: Users can adjust transaction categories directly on the Attributes reports within the Client Dashboard.

• Processed Upload Data: If customers upload bank statements or documents (via Flinks Upload), the processed data and resulting Attributes insights are accessible in the Flinks Dashboard once the data processing is complete.