GDS Link’s New Way to Deliver Value

A consultative partnership program that helps lenders stay ahead in a rapidly changing financial world.

Over the past year, GDS Link has transformed its partnership program, adopting a consultative approach that leverages GDS Link’s expertise to help clients identify, select, and implement the best solutions for their goals.

Nathan George, Partnerships Manager, is one of the key leaders driving this shift, explains the three principles that guide the program, as well as how the partnership team is already helping clients today.

What inspired you to become a part of the GDS Link team?

Nathan: Before joining GDS Link, I led TransUnion’s global strategic alliance program. I saw firsthand that credit bureau data is absolutely vital to this space; our clients can’t function without it. However, without an easy way to extract value from the data, you’re dead in the water.

There’s something so frustrating about knowing that transformative insights could help your business immediately, yet you’re stuck waiting to put them into practice. So, when GDS Link’s leaders approached me about leading a consultative partnership program that can help clients quickly take advantage of the great services being offered in the market today, I was really excited.

What’s your core approach to helping clients succeed through partnerships?

Nathan: Our mission is to facilitate solution discovery and execution finding the right solution for each client’s unique needs. We deliver speedy evaluations and implement them into their current workflow quickly, effectively, and cost-efficiently. In essence, we aim to help our clients achieve competitive differentiation by extracting maximum value from the latest solutions in the ecosystem.

How do partners and clients engage through the program?

Nathan: It starts with expertise. Our clients are barraged with marketing campaigns and trade show conversations promoting the latest, best-in-class service offerings. However, the pitches all sound very similar, and it’s hard to know what’s real and who is actually best. Most lenders lack the time and resources to conduct that research.

We help them narrow their focus to the products and services that can bring value to them. We’re constantly evaluating new partners and integrating solutions for our clients, allowing us to stay on top of the latest developments – so our clients don’t have to.

The second focus is speed. The cost of testing one provider, let alone two or three, is high and time consuming. And how many do you need to test to see if it will be worth the money you’re going to invest? This program helps our clients test, learn, and implement solutions quickly and without impacting infrastructure. And, of course, the faster you can go live with these services, the faster you can benefit.

The third element is visibility before, during, and after delivery. We leverage our clients’ and partners’ collective experiences and successes to develop new things. We can then expose those opportunities and advise our clients on the products, lines of business, services, and other factors that will make them more competitive.

How do you match clients with the right partners?

Nathan: Number one, it has to be a valuable product or service. Does it work and solve the problem it’s meant to solve without adding friction?

Second, is it price-competitive? The way the solution works, how it gets implemented, the costs, and the business model – what’s the business case? Just because it performs, it doesn’t mean it will be profitable for our client’s business.

Third is the business structure – how easy is it to do business with the partner? We look at brand risk, infosec, compliance, sales support, tech support, and more. Cultural fit is also important; after working through an implementation, how do they feel about working with that partner again?

Fourth is innovation. Does the partner help our clients differentiate? We seek innovative products that bring real, differentiated value. We aim to identify opportunities that our clients may not be aware of or have the ability to test and explore due to market complexity and resource constraints.

How is the partnership program helping clients manage change?

Nathan: Clients want help keeping up with the pace of change. AI is having a massive impact, especially on facilitating fraud. Two of the biggest examples are synthetic fraud, which is engineered to evade traditional detection by crafting identities that match verification data, and first-party fraud, where people intentionally open lines of credit with no intention of repaying them. They’re both costing firms a lot of money and are burning problems for our clients. They’re also complex because you have so many potential points of failure, and fraudsters are focused on exploiting those weaknesses.

We also see the incorporation of third-party data, insights, and advanced models being implemented across the lending lifecycle.  For example, a lot of innovation is happening at the top of the funnel. Aligning your marketing and new customer acquisition strategies with your credit policy provides a wealth of benefits and results in the more effective use of your marketing spend and, ultimately, happier customers.

Bank data offers valuable insights that can give our clients a competitive advantage. We help clients leverage AI to analyze this data and stay ahead of the market. Our work with clients involves implementing bank data in credit decisions to verify income and validate bank accounts, so they can make origination decisions for consumers with limited credit history through secondary review processes and assess default risk during routine account reviews.

Where is the program headed next?

Nathan: Looking ahead, we expect agentic AI to change the competitive marketplace. These are agents that make important decisions independently of a human. For example, an AI could rebalance your investment portfolio or move your savings account to a different institution. A lender could have AI adjust key components of its origination workflow in response to market changes, customer composition, and/or other factors.

The ability to quickly test and implement new solutions now provides an opportunity to build the processes and skills necessary to keep pace with the changes AI is already bringing to the market.

Aligning your marketing and new customer acquisition strategies with your credit policy will be critical.

Ultimately, we are constantly looking at how we can make it easier for our clients to implement these great solutions faster and with fewer resources.

We want our clients to see that they can deploy innovative solutions without it costing a lot of money, taking a lot of time, or requiring a lot of compliance, legal, and software resources. We want them to get going quickly and start accruing the benefits just as fast.

Want to learn more? Contact us to discover how our partnership team can help you find the best solutions and services for your needs – today and in the future.