Addressing remitting behavior using an ordinal classification approach

•SVM-based classifiers work well to analyze the remitting behavior of immigrants.•Ordinal SVM classifiers outperform nominal ones (logistic regression, ANN and SVM).•Remitting profiles are drawn from the support vectors of the SVMOP classifier.•Misclassified patterns are analyzed based on the projection of SVOREX results.•Banks that apply ordinal SVM-based approach can achieve competitive advantage.

The remittance market represents a great business opportunity for financial institutions given the increasing volume of these capital flows throughout the world. However, the corresponding business strategy could be costly and time consuming because immigrants do not respond to general media campaigns. In this paper, the remitting behavior of immigrants have been addressed by a classification approach that predicts the remittance levels sent by immigrants according to their individual characteristics, thereby identifying the most profitable customers within this group. To do so, five nominal and two ordinal classifiers were applied to an immigrant sample and their resulting performances were compared. The ordinal classifiers achieved the best results; the Support Vector Machine with Ordered Partitions (SVMOP) yielded the best model, providing information needed to draw remitting profiles that are useful for financial institutions. The Support Vector Machine with Explicit Constraints (SVOREX), however, achieved the second best results, and these results are presented graphically to study misclassified patterns in a natural and simple way. Thus, financial institutions can use this ordinal SVM-based approach as a tool to generate valuable information to develop their remittance business strategy.