TransUnion Live: How Government Agencies Can Help Consumers Navigate Financial Strains

Andrew Goss/Host:

Well, welcome, everybody to another episode of TransUnion Live on LinkedIn. I'm TransUnion's Andrew Goss, and I am excited to be joined by my esteemed colleagues, TransUnion Senior Vice President of Public Sector, Jeff Huth, and Director of Research and Consulting, also for Public Sector, Greg Schlichter. Welcome, you two.

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Hi, thank you.

Andrew Goss/Host:

Well, we're here today to discuss how US government agencies can help consumers better navigate financial strains based on findings from a recent TransUnion study. But before we begin, I have a quick housekeeping note for the audience I always start off with. We welcome your questions as long as they're related to today's conversation in the comments area below. If they're applicable and we don't get to them right away, we'll do our best to respond to you afterwards. Now, let's get started. To kick things off, Jeff, I'm going to go to you, but feel free to talk as well, Greg. Jeff, can you paint a picture of the trust deficit US government agencies have faced basically for the last couple decades, right?

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

Yeah. I'd love to, Andrew, and then I'd love to hear Greg's thoughts on it too. And there's a variety of research that's been published, some ours and some elsewhere. And the one that I'll cite first, it was done by Pew Research Center, and it basically tracked trust in government I think going back to almost 1958, so going back for a very, very long time. And it's been on a continual decline ever since they've started measuring it, to a point where it's now at near historic lows. When you look at the numbers, it's basically 25%, so one in four people, roughly, actually trust that the government is doing the right thing all the time or just most of the time. So that's not a particularly strong opinion from the citizens around if the government is always doing the right thing on their behalf.

TransUnion, we've done our own surveys. Greg will get into some more of the details. One of them that always sticks in my mind is 13% of people who just simply chose not to enroll in government benefits because they didn't trust the government with their personal information. I mean, that's one out of 10 or two out of 10, depending upon how you round that. That's still a lot of people when it comes to people who are eligible for a government benefit who chose not to because they didn't have trust in government.

I think when you look at that, it comes down to measuring the voice of the customer. I think that's kind of what we're doing here. As citizens, constituents, they're customers of the government, if you want to think of it that way. And helping the government and then the consumers and citizens trust each other, build trust in that relationship, is how that transaction needs to happen, how that trust needs to happen, where a citizen can trust the government with its information, the government can trust the citizen, that it's not fraudulent, that it's for the right reasons.

And this trust deficit is providing that high level of trust, that trust deficit creates a situation that's inefficient. It's inefficient in terms of resources and benefits and programs that need to get to people, and it's inefficient in terms of the work that the government needs to get to them. So there's a variety of things I think we're going to get onto in this discussion on how we can make trust possible. Thoughts, Greg?

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Yeah. No, I mean, I'll just chime in to add that there are a couple of different barometers for public trust in government. Pew has the gold standard. I also look at the ... I believe it's the Partnership for Public Service. They do a similar survey every year. And the most recent one found ... I think it was 23% of people trust the government, two-thirds stated explicitly they do not trust the government. And that trust gap has been widening over the years as they've been doing it.

And I think it's important for all of us to not just admire the problem, to see the line trending down over time. There are things that can and should be done to start to change the minds of people who maybe had a past bad interaction with government, maybe how do we get them back on our side? Or how do we combat some of the either misinformation, some of the anecdotes ... My relative, my coworker had to call this government agency to do something that didn't turn out so well. What can agency leaders do to really regain control of their brand, of their image, in the market and start to rebuild the trust that was lost over the past 20, 30 years?

Andrew Goss/Host:

Yeah. Some fascinating findings there. Greg, you are the data person. You are the research and consulting guru in the government space. So are there any other specific findings talking about that trust gap or have we touched on all of them?

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Yeah, so Jeff touched on one. It's a survey we did, TransUnion Public Sector did last year. I think before I discuss the data point I want to, I want to paint just a little bit of context here that this trust gap is important because it does have a real impact on people's lives and the ability of agencies to meet their missions. It really isn't just a branding or a marketing concern.

So we did that survey last year, and Jeff spoke to it, where we asked people who thought they qualified for government benefits but still didn't apply why they chose not to apply. And 13% said they didn't trust the government. I mean, that's absolutely shocking. By my math, that's around, let's say, one in eight people who haven't applied for food stamps or disaster assistance or maybe some type of retirement benefit despite qualifying. They're just opting out of participation in these programs due to trust issues. That's why it's so important. That tends to get lost in the conversation, but at a certain point, if somebody doesn't trust, they're not going to engage. That's why we need to start reversing this trend.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

Yeah. And I think as you look at the trend and you look at some of the research and especially the economic situation that people are dealing with currently is they're more pessimistic, they're feeling more stressed, they're feeling more strained. So you see this dynamic where ... I'm feeling the pressure, I want to ask for help, but I don't have the trust built that I can seek the help that I necessarily need. And that creates not only difficult for individuals, difficult for government to serve the individuals. It's just a situation we need to work on.

Andrew Goss/Host:

Yeah, that's a great segue. So Jeff, I want to turn to the current US economic environment. There's all sorts of stuff going on that people are trying to make sense of right now. So Greg, I'm going to tap you for this, for really a lot of the data. Talk about the latest consumer price index and TransUnion findings around debt payments and credit card spending.

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Yeah. So yesterday's inflation read was an annual rate of 2.7%, I believe, core CPI, which is higher than the 2.6% in the previous month, and certainly hotter than most people were expecting. I think we all know the Fed targets that 2% rate, and CPI has just been stubbornly resisting efforts to get closer to that value.

But while the headline CPI read gets a lot of attention, it's important when we're discussing impacts on consumers' finances to consider the cumulative impact of inflation over time. I think we all remember ... Was it 2021, '22, when the inflation rate was three or four times higher than what it has been. And many of those price impacts still exist. Just because CPI doesn't go down doesn't mean prices are going down. So it's important to remember that we're still feeling the effects of what has come before us, even though that headline number has gone back down to a more palatable level.

And let's think a little bit about the incidence of inflation because that's what's really important here, when you think about money leaving people's bank accounts because things are so expensive. Most people use credit cards to buy most things, and many people don't pay their balances in full each month. So the impact of inflation, again, in terms of a cash outflow from a bank account, is kind of spread forward in time. You charge something worth a hundred dollars today, but that hundred bucks leaves your account a little bit more, due to interest, over the course of a couple of months. Now what you end up paying, because it's on a credit card, a variable rate product, is highly sensitive to interest rates.

So you get kind of a double whammy. People are paying more at the point of sale because prices are higher, and then because they're not paying that immediately, they're spreading it forward in time, they're subject to the upward trajectory of interest rates that we saw over the past couple of years, which just further increases the amount of money people are going to see leave their bank accounts in total.

Now, we recently published some findings that my group came up with, where we looked at how has the median consumer's debt changed in this environment? And what we found is that debt tends to keep pace. Total debt levels tend to keep pace with inflation, or they have over the past four years. And that's to be expected. But interestingly, the amount paid to service that debt has significantly outpaced inflation. I think cumulative impact of inflation over the past four years has been a total 20%, ballpark, change in price levels, but we've seen almost 55, almost 60% increase in what people actually pay to service their debt.

And that's largely due to that interest rate exposure. The Fed raised rates for a while. They've recently lowered rates, and that will likely lead to lower interest rates on consumer credit products, but it won't really affect the burden facing households that have been building debt on these variable rate products over the past few years. A credit card rate is like 20%, and it's going to take time for that to move significantly enough based on Fed actions for households to see meaningful relief. Does that make sense? Sorry, I kind of stood on my-

Andrew Goss/Host:

Yeah, no. It makes plenty of ... I mean, I've called it compound inflation, but it's really compound, compound, compound, compound inflation, right? Well, sticking with that, and Jeff, I want to get your take on this, but I want to tie it back into the government trust, with US consumers experiencing significant inflation. Even though it's not at record levels, we talked about this compound inflation, high interest rates obviously, that Greg talked about, and then later on, these rising and/or exorbitant housing prices. Why now? Why is it such a critical time to rebuild trust with government?

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

Yeah. Greg detailed the mechanics behind the financial situation that people are feeling. And it's pretty clear that people have ... They're under financial strain. They feel the financial strain, for all the mechanics that Greg described that have them feeling that way.

When it comes to it being now, we already talked about some of the statistics around the number of people that don't believe the trust in the government. So again, it goes back to my comment a little earlier. When you have that much fear and uncertainty within the population financially, coupled with the normal course of relief would be to go to the government, but they don't trust the government ... Either they don't trust them with the information, that our survey has shown, they don't trust that they're going to do the right thing. The level of trust isn't there. So now you have the individuals, what are they going to do? So these individuals still need to make ends meet. Depending upon their situation, they may choose alternate ways to make their ends meet. Depending upon what they have, that could be crime, fraud, espionage, something, if they're really serious enough about their financial situation.

And I think when it comes to helping and doing it now, I think you hear a pivot towards fraud. Fraud. Well, we got to stop fraud. We need to worry about fraud. I think fraud is an element, but it's really the consumer experience that we need to be focusing on right now. And that consumer experience is ... How do we create an environment, create a situation, create a transaction where the consumer can trust the government when they're reaching out to the government, and a situation where the government is proactively reaching out to the consumers. At the same time, that is the process of building the trust.

And when that trust is established, can we further enhance that trust, at least from the government side, that says, "Hey, I now have a citizen that I'm interacting with, I'm providing a benefit for, I'm determining their eligibility, I'm providing them a service. How can I, as the government agency, trust that this is a genuine person? They're eligible, they're not a fraudster, they're not using it for different purposes?" Likewise, the citizen needs to know, when they're interacting with the government, giving up a lot of information, that it's going to be protected and taken care of. I think it's important now because we're at that point where they're feeling the pinch in their finances, they're pessimistic about the future, they need help from the government, and the trust gap is still strong.

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Just to add to that, ultimately, given macroeconomic trends over the past four years, a wide swath of people just have less financial resiliency. They are one, I don't know, blown tire or burst pipe away from significant financial hardship. And I would expect that, given this elevated level of fragility, more people are going to be exploring the different services and benefits provided by government agencies designed to help people in their situation.

Let's also not forget, we're sitting here, in December 2024. There is a new administration coming in. There is a new Congress. And they have a different approach towards securing America's economic future. And we don't really want or need to get political here, but given the rhetoric that is surrounding the election, I don't think it's surprising that many people have a different expectation regarding how the government will serve them, in a very real sense. What are going to happen to these programs I rely on, or that I might need? Or will there be new programs to help people like me? I mean, these are all creating a sense of ... Maybe not distrust, but unease.

So if we think about why is it critical to rebuild trust right now, you've got more people actively looking at government agencies and how they intersect with their lives, but they're doing it in a highly uncertain environment. They're already primed not to trust these agencies because of the decades-long decline in government trust in general. There's a pessimism that agencies need to overcome, otherwise the programs they've set up to help people will go underutilized.

And overcoming that pessimism really requires intent. It requires direct action and visibility from agency leaders, because in the absence of taking positive steps to engage people and let them know, "Hey, we provide this," or, "We're here for you, you can trust us," whatever it is, if you are not filling that space, if you're leaving silence, other people will fill it in for you, and they may not be as charitable or even correct about what they're saying. And that just perpetuates the low trust we've seen.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

It could create situations where fraud could be perpetrated on these consumers. Greg, that's a great point, where they could become victims in their own right because they're looking and believing for alternatives and solutions.

Andrew Goss/Host:

Yeah. All fascinating things. So quick break, cue the music. Just a quick reminder for the audience, if you have any applicable questions, we welcome them. Put them in the comments area below, and we'll hopefully get to them today. So back to today's conversation. Switching things up a little bit, in the TransUnion study I mentioned earlier, it highlighted three financial realities facing some US consumers. Can both of you go into details about those three financial realities?

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

Yeah. Greg, you can go ahead and start.

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Yeah, sure. So we highlighted three sub-segments of the US population in that report that are worth attention and worth really thinking about. First, we have those who are experiencing financial hardship, right? They are the group of people that are actively missing payments on their credit cards, on their mortgages. They have maxed out their available credit. They've tried and failed to get more credit, and they can't. And these are the folks who are beyond pinched, right? It is an active detriment to their life. They are underwater. They are in dire need of financial assistance. And as we all know, that can be the first domino to fall into a series of dominoes that can lead to some pretty negative outcomes.

The second group we highlighted are those who are not ... They're not quite at that tipping point yet, but they do appear to be financially pinched, right? Maybe they've gone from paying off their credit cards every month in full to only paying the minimum due. Maybe they purchased a home last year, expecting interest rates to go down, and that hasn't quite happened yet. And now they're seeing their credit utilization really start to tick up as they're just not making enough to meet that mortgage payment in the long run. These are folks who aren't, again, in dire straits necessarily, but the alarm bells are starting to go off.

And then the last group we highlighted were those who may be expecting significant economic upheaval, broader macroeconomic upheaval, and are preparing for the worst. They are reducing their overall spend drastically or they're aggressively paying down debt. They're generally pessimistic about the macroeconomic environment and what it means for them in terms of maybe getting a job or being able to retire or whatever it happens to be. And that can fuel broader dissatisfaction with the state of their financial health.

And in some cases, even, the steps somebody takes to prepare for a downturn can actually precipitate financial strain that can move these consumers into one of those other two buckets we just talked about. It is not entirely rational, but we've seen it time and time again, where there's a group of people who think an economic event is going to happen. They want to have a lot of savings. And to begin building those savings, they'll stop paying off some of their credit debt. They'll go from paying their card in full every month to only paying the minimum or only paying the interest on their mortgage. And that might make sense in some circumstances, but oftentimes that can lead to an issue in the medium and long term.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

And I think that that last category, they may not be the group that's particularly looking for assistance from government benefits, but clearly they're feeling and taking actions, as Greg described. They're pessimistic about the future. That has an impact on the broader psyche of the country, when there's that level of pessimism and they are not buying things and they're saving money. And that has a greater knock-on effect to the greater part of the economy. Then that knock-on effect does translate into the ones that are in the earlier categories that Greg talked about, the ones that are feeling the tightening, and then the ones that are not just feeling a tightening but are really experiencing hardship. Those last two categories, those are the ones who are going to be looking for help again, seeking some kind of assistance from the government.

And that gets back to then building that trust, and that's where I wanted to take my comments against this one, was just getting back to the trust factor again, and considering it as a consumer experience mission. So think of yourself as an individual, and I think this is what we're doing by talking about ... Know your customer. In this case, that's really what we're doing, is we're talking about, again, citizens who are customers of the government. They're customers of the services that the government provides. In this case, it could be social programs, it could be law enforcement, anything that any level of government does for the citizens. Think of them as customers. Know your customers, as you need to know the environment they're in, know what they're willing to quote, unquote, "buy," know if they're willing to react to you, and about brand.

And it's certainly not all about brand, but it is about their experience in interacting with the government. And that experience needs to be seamless. It needs to be low friction. If we only worried about fraud, we turn all the dials one way, and then that consumer experience would go really bad. So it can't just be about fraud detection. It has to be about the right benefits getting to the right people. That interaction, there needs to be trust. We'll get into in a little bit, I hope, specific things that they can do, that agencies and citizens can do, to build that trust.

But that's really what it has to come down to, is it's a relationship, it's a transaction. It's a citizen interacting with a business, in this case the government. How do I trust the business? How do I trust the citizen? How do I build that relationship so that when that transaction is occurring, the citizen and the government can feel rewarded in what's happening? And more importantly, from the citizen's point of view, they feel that trust, so they're willing to approach the government for the help that they clearly need.

Andrew Goss/Host:

Yeah. That's a fascinating approach to government relations, that you got to change your mindset and think of it in a different way. Okay, so quick break. I want to remind the audience if you have any applicable questions, put them in the comments area. We'll get to them hopefully today. So selfishly, let's get back to my last specific question. And I think, Jeff, you talked briefly about this, but now that we've defined those three financial realities facing some US consumers, how can those US government agencies help address each of them, especially given the current economic environment we talked about, about 20 minutes or so ago?

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Let's go group by group. So for that first group of people, those who are currently experiencing hardship, for my money, that's going to be the group that I think is going to be most interested in government assistance programs, maybe for the first time, maybe a repeat customer. Definitely not something on the scale of what we saw during the pandemic, but there's likely to be some steady growth in the number of people interested in programs, which if you think about that, that leads to increases in enrollment, higher volumes of calls going into call centers, more strain on your login portal on your website, a lot more just stuff to deal with in your eligibility verification pipelines, right? Things like that.

And agencies ... I think they are, but should be ensuring that they can handle, again, ID verification, doc authentication, dealing with an increase in call volume, inbound and outbound, even thinking through how they can find and engage people who probably qualify for their programs but aren't utilizing them, right? Now's the time to really start thinking about that.

It's also worth noting, I think, that as these programs receive more attention, as more people begin to apply, that will inevitably attract fraud, right? Fraudsters follow the money. There are professionals who will try to concoct schemes to blend in with legitimate traffic coming to different programs and lead money out of the system that way, or socially engineer a call center employee into revealing PII that they use for some other purpose. Or it could be more opportunistic, somebody desperate for assistance who uses a dead relative's social security number to apply for a program that they don't qualify for. You have to cover all your bases.

And I think that gets to what Jeff was talking about, and that's a bit of a balancing act when it comes to trust. How do you ensure you can meet the increase in demand and the increase in attention and utilization while simultaneously protecting your agency from fraud, right? How do you orchestrate that across different channels? Because you don't just show up to an office and apply for a benefit now. You can do it on your phone, you can do it online, through a call center, whatever. Too little friction in that process will result in fraud, which will erode trust, while too much friction means that nobody's getting through, nobody's getting any of the help they need, and that would also erode trust. So it's finding the right point on that spectrum for each agency or program, and again, finding that point now before there's an issue, because you have a lot to lose by not getting it right, but not a lot necessarily to gain, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

I want to add to Greg's comments, and throw out a few more statistics from our survey that we did last year. When it came to applying for government benefits, something like one in four said the application process looked too difficult or confusing. That's a problem. One in 10 people needed help, wanted help getting through it, but they didn't have access to the help. And then I think it was ... Correct me if I'm wrong here, Greg, something like 10 or 11% that didn't have the appropriate documentation or didn't believe they had appropriate documentation to follow that process.

So to me, I think about it, and I completely agree with Greg, that when we look at the different groups that we're definitely talking about the hardship groups and put them into that category, but it comes down to three things. It comes down to outreach, it comes down to access, and it comes down to efficiency.

And outreach, for example, let's take the groups. If it's really difficult or we believe it's difficult, let's find out who ... There are plenty of tools to find out who the ... I'll use the audiences, who are the people that are eligible that aren't yet in the program. Let's explain to them how the process works. Let's show them how, to take them through steps, so the process isn't as confusing as it may seem. Things like ... And Greg talked about this from a call center, when they're in the process and you're trying to build that trust during the initial part of that transaction, again, when the government agency is contacting the citizen, wouldn't it be great if the citizen sees the number on their phone instead of seeing spam or some number they don't recognize? They actually see the agency that's calling them.

Connect rates increase double digits when companies are using something like that, called branded caller display. You can see, "Oh, I'm going to take this phone call because I know this is the department of wherever I'm working with, and they're contacting me about my application." That builds trust. That builds trust right there because they know who's calling them and that connection happens and it makes it efficient. That's outreach.

The other one is access, and we talked a little bit about access, and Greg talked about that in terms of friction. It's providing them the technical assistance through a human or digital. And the human can be the contact center again. I'm going to call in. Now wouldn't it be great when that citizen is calling in that rather than having to say, "I am Jeff Huth, I am the citizen, here is my social security number," spending all that time to do identity verification, they could do that off of the digital channel already. That capability exists as well. So things that you can do to make that transaction less laborious and also create a sense of oneness when you're engaging someone in a contact center and you're talking to someone and you've already gotten through some of the fraud checks, you've already gotten through some of the authentication work, and you don't have to do that. It feels more personal at that point.

And then making it simpler with the multiple channels that someone could access on the digital side of it. And Greg talked about that, making the friction right, putting just enough amount of friction in the process to make it difficult for fraudsters, but not so much friction that the consumer experience becomes horrible.

And then the last one was efficiency. And efficiency is kind of where I put the fraud, waste, and abuse part of that. It's now that the interaction ... You've reached them, you've talked to them, you've given them instructions, you've found out who to talk to, you're working on the access through the center, you're working on the access digitally. Now the transaction is happening. This is where we're focusing on the fraud, waste, and abuse part of it again.

And instead of allowing the transaction to occur in creating fraud, wouldn't it be great if we could do some of that stuff that we just talked about up front? Instead of paying chase, we're actually preventing the fraud. We're attempting to prevent the fraud before it actually occurs. The efficiency part of that. Efficiency is a big word that we're hearing lately in particular with the federal government.

But again, if we're doing too much here around fraud and we're turning those dials too tightly and we're putting on too much friction, then all of the outreach, all of the access is going to be meaningless because you've made it too hard for that citizen. You made the consumer experience a miserable one. You may have prevented a lot of fraud, taken a lot of fraud out of it, but now the consumer experience is bad. So it really comes to a balancing act of making it a positive consumer experience so the consumer trusts the government, while the government is trusting that they're not being defrauded by the citizen, the consumer that they're interacting with, the applicant who they're interacting with.

Andrew Goss/Host:

All really interesting things. And thanks for tying that all together, Jeff. That was great. Anything else? If I was a reporter, this would be the gotcha question at the end. Anything else that you want to get to that we haven't touched on in this conversation?

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

For the sake of completeness, it's the way my brain works, let me spend a second just talking about those other two groups of people and what could be done to better engage them. So if we think about that second group of people, those who are kind of pinched but not necessarily in the hole yet, that's an awareness and preparedness play, making sure people are informed about the different forms of government assistance available to them, should they need it, and how they can access it.

I think a good analogy is probably how FEMA approaches flood insurance. They get the hurricane season predictions, they know where the storms are going to hit, then they canvas those areas to encourage homeowners to apply for flood insurance before the storm actually gets there.

I think there's a need for a similar kind of proactive outreach here for this group. And I know that's not a reflex all agencies have, to proactively target and engage communities or people who may need their services in the future, but sometimes you do hear officials say, "Hey, it's not my job to make sure you're aware of program A or benefit B. If you need it, you'll figure it out, and you'll figure out how to get it." And that's the sort of attitude that erodes trust in government and gets us to the state of perpetual pessimism that we're in regarding agencies' abilities to do the right thing.

Expectations around government messaging and outreach, both the channels that they're using, how it is presented, how it is conducted, all of that has changed dramatically since the pandemic. And I mean, ultimately, if you go back to thinking of agencies as a business that are providing services to a taxpayer, they need to meet their customers, their constituents, where they're at, rather than hoping constituents know to knock on their door when they need to.

And the last bit, the last group we talked about, those preppers who are expecting the worst, probably the least important of the three in terms of needing direct engagement in onboarding strategy, but they're also likely to be the loudest when it comes to expressing discontent with the economy and then, by extension, with government in general. And that's where I think transparency will be a big differentiator. Making the public aware of what your agency is doing for people in the other two groups or anyone else can go a long way in avoiding having that silence that you allow other people to fill. That's promoting the investments you're making in protecting against fraud, telling good news stories, highlighting improvements to the customer experience, actually making improvements in the customer experience.

All of that's going to be key in taking control of the narrative to avoid having a group of rightfully or wrongfully malcontents from creating their own stories that just will further erode trust and could even limit the ability of what you're able to do in terms of moving the needle on rebuilding trust, improving customer experience, could paint a target on your back for fraud. It's a group that needs to be ... If not directly managed, at least you need to be aware of them and understand what it is they're doing and saying about your agency.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

So Andrew, I would answer that question also by just coming back to the title of what we're doing here, helping consumers navigate financial strains. In order to do that, you have to actually know your customer. We used that term earlier on. And it's not the macroeconomic conditions, it's the microeconomics. It's what's going on in the individual households, and not just now at a point in time, but at a trended level. Where are they going? What direction are they going? Where's the hockey puck going, instead of where is the hockey puck now?

And I think once we can ... Greg talked about it as a reflex. I agree with that. When we have the reflex to think of it as ... Who am I addressing? Where are they going to be in 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 months from now, based on the environment that they're living in? Given the services that I'm attempting to offer to them, how can I ensure that the maximum amount of people who I need to address are getting it, at the same time I'm doing so most efficiently and with the lowest amount of fraud, with the best consumer experience I can give them.

And I think thinking like that strategically, starting with some of the best practices that businesses use, who are my customers, know my customer, how do I serve them, how do I create brand reputation, how do I build trust in that transaction? A business will think about it as not just a one-and-done customer, but a repeat customer, and even a referenceable customer. And I think that's a goal agencies should look for. How do I turn my applicants, the people I'm serving, how do I turn them into advocates for me? Think bold. Not just customers, not just people I serve, but advocates and proponents of what we're doing for them.

Andrew Goss/Host:

That's fascinating stuff. Anything else before we move on here?

Greg Schlichter/Director Research & Consulting, TransUnion

Nothing on my end.

Andrew Goss/Host:

Okay.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

No, thank you.

Andrew Goss/Host:

It's amazing. Just a mindset shift in terms of how government agencies are thinking about themselves. Well, thank you so much, Greg and Jeff, for these great insights. I've said it before, I'll say it again, just always amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge here at TransUnion. And I'm not just saying it. I've had conversations across the enterprise. They're so different and all fascinating.

Special thank you to the audience for joining us. If we didn't get your question today, or if you think of something afterwards, we'll circle back with you as long as it's related to today's conversation. To download findings from our recent study we discussed today, I'll be putting the web address, TransUnion.com/government-experiences, and a QR code up on the screen. You can also find it by going to the LinkedIn live event page. You are all on right now, and go on the description tab. And we'll see you next time on TransUnion Live.

Jeffrey Huth/SVP Public Sector, TransUnion:

Thank you.