Member Article

West Dunbartonshire Council invests in predictive analytics to mitigate Universal Credit

West Dunbartonshire Council has invested in a predictive analytical software solution, called RentSense, to help them proactively mitigate the effects of Universal Credit.

“Rent collection is a key priority for our Council and with the introduction of Universal Credit and other welfare reforms, we felt we had to be proactive in our approach. Previously, like many local authorities, we were reactive to this issue. That usually meant we were only actually assisting tenants who were suffering financial difficulties possibly weeks after they first ran into trouble,” explained Ryan Chalmers, Section Head of Revenues and Benefits at West Dunbartonshire Council.

The council want to take a ‘prevention rather than cure’ approach to Universal Credit and their investment in Mobysoft’s RentSense solution is part of this strategy.

“We felt it necessary to explore the market in terms of software that would allow us to predict future changes and analyse tenant behaviour to allow us to manage these changes and improve on rent collection,” commented Ryan.

Mobysoft’s RentSense solution is used by over 80 other social landlords and is recognised by the sector as a key tool for creating and embedding efficiencies. It also enables landlords to offer their tenants greater support and intervene often before tenants go into arrears or at the first stages of low level debt whilst also increasing rent collection rates. This proved to be the catalyst for West Dunbartonshire’s investment, as Ryan explains:

“We were looking for software that would analyse our current and historic data to allow us to tackle the many challenges that we are faced with in terms of rent collection. We have recently streamlined our process and we felt RentSense was the next step in continuing this process to improve rent collection.”

“Many landlords are striving for further savings and RentSense is a trusted solution that embeds immediate efficiencies and gets landlords speaking to the right tenants at the right time, which is critical in this Universal Credit era,” commented Paul Evans, Commercial Director at Mobysoft.

“We are looking forward to working with West Dunbartonshire Council and the go-live of RentSense in the Summer.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Adrian Mills .