Swisscard Improves Early Collections, Reduces Net Credit Losses 40 Percent With FICO Analytics

BENSHEIM, Germany, March 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

Highlights:

• Swisscard increased its revenue from billable collection expenses by about 50 percent.
• Account terminations reduced more than 30 percent and net credit losses by more than 40 percent.
• Swisscard increased Net Promoter Score by more than 11 points.
• Swisscard won a 2019 FICO® Decisions Award for Debt Management.

Swisscard AECS GmbH, a leading credit card company in Switzerland, has optimized its early collections using FICO analytics leading to a 50 percent increase in revenue from billable collection expenses, a 40 percent reduction in net credit losses, a 30 percent reduction in account terminations whilst also lifting its Net Promotor Score for customers in collections by 11 points through improved customer interactions.

For its achievements, Swisscard won a 2019 FICO® Decisions Award for Debt Management.

More information: https://www.fico.com/en/products/collections-and-recovery

Switzerland has a stable economy and low delinquency levels but Swisscard wanted to pursue a new growth strategy targeted at larger numbers of new and risk-appropriate consumers.

To achieve this, a joint team of Swisscard and FICO experts assessed the current state of the collections and recovery process and identified a number of key activities that would increase effectiveness across the debt management lifecycle. FICO recommended the introduction of analytically-driven treatment strategies which led to a more targeted collections focus, including earlier and stronger treatments for high risk accounts.

"With over 1.5 million cards in our portfolio and a 28 percent share of the market, our growth strategy meant taking on new customers with an optimized risk/return profile," said Ignazio Provinzano, Head of Risk Operations at Swisscard. "We were concerned about the continuation of current high recovery results and higher collection account volumes as well as maintaining the high levels of service for which we are known, so we turned to FICO to help fine-tune our approach."

Subsequently, a data driven segmentation strategy has been implemented facilitating a more targeted collections focus. This helped to overcome some of the early collections constraints such as collector capacity and limited use of self-servicing mechanisms such as two-way SMS and IVR.

Substantial additional productivity gains were made from improvements to existing dialler technology which saw a 60 percent increase in collector efficiency. A better customer experience was also established by better aligning customer communications with non-verbal collection actions such as late fee and card block.

"By making improvements across the business, the results have been spectacular," said Jens Dauner, Managing Director DACH & Central Europe, FICO.  "The changes are both effective and multi-pronged; Swisscard has collected substantially more revenue, re-designed its customer communications to create a more consistent and positive customer journey and improved collector productivity."

"Swisscard had a very clear objective for its business improvement project which helped them remain focused on the analytic techniques that would deliver the best outcomes," said Leslie Parrish, analyst for retail banking at Aite and one of the FICO Decisions Awards judges. "Swisscard has maximized its ROI by letting the call agents focus on the most promising accounts instead of just following a list approach. By doing so, they positively influenced the behavior of their customers while preserving relationships, both of which can be very difficult in the collections context."

About Swisscard
Swisscard AECS GmbH is a leading card company owned by Credit Suisse and American Express. Swisscard is the only company in Switzerland to offer the world's most important card brands American Express, Mastercard and Visa all in one place. Swisscard customers have the largest selection of card products on the Swiss market. Thanks to the different product ranges, customers can put together a personalized combination of cards. Swisscard manages over 1.5 million cards and the American Express points of acceptance in Switzerland. Swisscard is the market leader in the premium sector, with cards for companies and with the co-branding cards. Swisscard employs approximately 700 employees in Horgen (ZH).

About the FICO® Decisions Awards
The FICO Decisions Awards recognize organizations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2019 judges are:

• Mike Gualtieri, VP and principal analyst at Forrester
• Sharon Kimathi, editor at FinTech Futures
• Leslie Parrish, analyst – retail banking at Aite
• Denise Sleem, functional specialist at Medscheme/Helios (2018 winner)
• Alex Woodie, managing editor at Datanami
• Les Yeamans, founder at RT Insights

The winners of the FICO Decisions Awards will be spotlighted at various FICO events in 2020 and win tickets to FICO® World 2021, the Decisions Conference, April 2021 in Orlando, Florida.

About FICO
FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 195 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 100 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time.

Learn more at www.fico.com.

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SOURCE FICO

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