We’re excited to announce the introduction of social media data analysis in our Risk platform and MerchantProfiler products. This first-of-a-kind offering allows software platforms to leverage creator data from Instagram and Youtube to set up custom risk rules and actions for merchants on their platform. This automation helps streamline the underwriting process, saving risk teams hundreds of hours per month and significantly reducing false positives.

Read on to learn more, and contact us to get started today.

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The problem: manual underwriting is time consuming & error prone

In the last 10 years, the creator economy has fundamentally transformed how businesses operate and engage with their audiences. Thousands of creators now leverage Instagram and Youtube to sell their products, and these creators increasingly rely on software platforms to power their payments.

When software platforms underwrite creators and onboard them to their platform, they need to leverage context-specific social media data to better understand their business viability. Up until now, this has been a manual process: risk analysts manually looked up a creator’s social media profile and noted down metrics such as their follower count, account age, posting consistency, and other engagement analytics. While this process generates useful underwriting insights, it’s time consuming, taking up to 20 minutes per merchant.

“Social media data intelligence is vital for onboarding and monitoring creators and freelancers, giving us tangible insights for smarter decisions. Having it integrated into one risk platform such as Coris will transform how we manage risk—faster, simpler, and more effective.”

• Marty Chanes, Senior Payments Risk Manager at Kajabi

As software platforms increasingly voiced their frustrations with this manual process, we asked ourselves: was there an opportunity to automate this process, just as we’d automated other risk workflows? 

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Incorporating social media signals into our risk engine

This new feature allows platforms to instantly receive key social media insights on their creator customers in order to underwrite them accurately and reduce false positives. 

Our initial rollout focuses on Instagram and Youtube, which represent a significant portion of the creator economy. For example, more than 25% of content creators say that Instagram is their top channel for generating engagement. For each channel, we offer the following data:

• Instagram: Account creation date, follower count, post count, verification status, business account vs. personal account, public vs. private account status
• Youtube: Channel creation date, subscriber count, total videos, total views, verified channel status, presence of age restrictions on the channel, linked websites, channel descriptions

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How Does It Work?

Risk teams can use our risk platform to set up custom rules based on the aforementioned Instagram or Youtube signals. Teams can set up rules solely based on social media signals, or they can combine these signals with other internal platform data, data from MerchantProfiler, or from a payment processor like Stripe or Adyen. For example, a risk analyst can set up a rule that checks a creator’s social media follower count if the account is witnessing explosive payment growth.

Once a custom risk rule is set up, teams can assign it a specific action, such as automatic approval or forwarding to manual review. If an account is forwarded to manual review, the team can review key metrics from Instagram and / or Youtube profile directly within our risk platform, eliminating the need for  external searches.

In addition, risk teams can leverage a unified “Social Media Rating” for each creator. This works similarly to our SiteRating feature for websites, and is a distilled score between 1 (excellent) and 5 (bad) for a merchant based on their social media attributes. Social Media Ratings are available to use in MerchantProfiler, and as a signal in the rule engine.

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Learn more

We’re excited to make additional improvements on our social media signals, such as deeper sentiment analysis, engagement metrics for individual posts, and additional social media channels. 

Contact us if you’d like to learn more about this feature and how it can help you automate your underwriting processes.