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Updated November 17th Related Posts Link to automotive form, business form

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By: Wendy Greenawalt Given the current volatile market conditions and rising unemployment rates, no industry is immune from delinquent accounts. However, recent reports have shown a shift in consumer trends and attitudes related to cellular phones. For many consumers, a cell phone is an essential tool for business and personal use, and staying connected is a very high priority. Given this, many consumers pay their cellular bill before other obligations, even if facing a poor bank credit risk. Even with this trend, cellular providers are not immune from delinquent accounts and determining the right course of action to take to improve collection rates. By applying optimization, technology for account collection decisions, cellular providers can ensure that all variables are considered given the multiple contact options available. Unlike other types of services, cellular providers have numerous options available in an attempt to collect on outstanding accounts.  This, however, poses other challenges because collectors must determine the ideal method and timing to attempt to collect while retaining the consumers that will be profitable in the long term.  Optimizing decisions can consider all contact methods such as text, inbound/outbound calls, disconnect, service limitation, timing and diversion of calls.  At the same time, providers are considering constraints such as likelihood of curing, historical consumer behavior, such as credit score trends, and resource costs/limitations.  Since the cellular industry is one of the most competitive businesses, it is imperative that it takes advantage of every tool that can improve optimizing decisions to drive revenue and retention.  An optimized strategy tree can be easily implemented into current collection processes and provide significant improvement over current processes.

A recent article in the Boston Globe talked about the lack of incentive for banks to perform wide-scale real estate loan modifications due to the lack of profitability for lenders in the current government-led program structure. The article cited a recent study by the Boston Federal Reserve that noted up to 45 percent of borrowers who receive loan modifications end up in arrears again afterwards. On the other hand, around 30 percent of borrowers cured without any external support from lenders – leading them to believe that the cost and effort required modifying delinquent loans is not a profitable or not required proposition. Adding to this, one of the study’s authors was quoted as saying “a lot of people you give assistance to would default either way or won’t default either way.” The problem that lenders face is that although they have the knowledge that certain borrowers are prone to re-default, or cure without much assistance – there has been little information available to distinguish these consumers from each other.  Segmenting these customers is the key to creating a profitable process for loan modifications, since identification of the consumer in advance will allow lenders to treat each borrower in the most efficient and profitable manner. In considering possible solutions, the opportunity exists to leverage the power of credit data, and credit attributes to create models that can profile the behaviors that lenders need to isolate. Although the rapid changes in the economy have left many lenders without a precedent behavior in which to model, the recent trend of consumers that re-default is beginning to provide lenders with correlated credit attributes to include in their models. Credit attributes were used in a recent study on strategic defaulters by the Experian-Oliver Wyman Market Intelligence Reports, and these attributes created defined segments that can assist lenders with implementing profitable loan modification policies and decisioning strategies.  

By definition, “Return on Investment” is simple: (The gain from an investment – The cost of the investment) _______________________________________________ The cost of the investment With such a simple definition, why do companies that develop fraud analytics and their customers have difficulty agreeing to move forward with new fraud models and tools?   I believe the answer lies in the definition of the factors that make up the ROI equation: “The gain from an investment”- When it comes to fraud, most vendors and customers want to focus on minimizing fraud losses.  But what happens when fraud losses are not large enough to drive change? To adopt new technology it’s necessary for the industry to expand its view of the “gain.”  One way to expand the “gain” is to identify other types of savings and opportunities that aren’t currently measured as fraud losses.  These include: Cost of other tools – Data returned by fraud tools can be used to resolve Red Flag compliance discrepancies and help fraud analysts manage high-risk accounts.  By making better use of this information, downstream costs can be avoided. Other types of “bad” organizations are beginning to look at the similarities among fraud and credit losses.  Rather than identifying a fraud trend and searching for a tool to address it, some industry leaders are taking a different approach — let the fraud tool identify the high-risk accounts, and then see what types of behavior exist in that population.  This approach helps organizations create the business case for constant improvement and also helps them validate the way in which they currently categorize losses. To increase cross sell opportunities – Focus on the “good” populations.  False positives aren’t just filtered out of the fraud review work flow, they are routed into other work flows where relationships can be expanded.