Austin Logistics Announces General Availability of its Award-Winning ActionSelect Treatment Optimization Solution

Austin Logistics, the leader in providing predictive analytic software solutions that maximize the financial value of each customer interaction, today announced the general availability of ActionSelect, its award-winning collections treatment management solution for all types of consumer debt. ActionSelect sharply reduces the time it takes to accurately predict, optimize, simulate and deploy the most precise, cost-effective and best treatment strategy for each delinquent account in a company?s portfolio.

Serving the financial services market with solutions that increase profitability and reduce risk, Austin Logistics counts among its customers seven of the world?s top banks, seven of the top 10 US credit card issuers, six of the leading auto finance companies and the global leader in online payments.

ActionSelect is now in use at a number of customer sites, including an implementation at a major US financial services provider known for its emphasis on customer satisfaction. There, ActionSelect helped the bank recover an estimated additional $10 million in annual benefit from a single portfolio while simultaneously reducing resource use by 10 percent.

According to Guillermo Kopp, vice president at TowerGroup, the leading advisory research and consulting firm focused exclusively on the global financial services industry, the financial services markets need solutions that respond to current market dynamics. “The competitive forces within and outside the industry have been changing the market from institutional centric into a genuine expression of customer focus. The competitive edge resides in aligning technology solutions with innovative business strategies that result in quantum improvements in the speed, efficiency, and responsiveness of financial services to the benefit of the customer experience.”

ActionSelect: Moving beyond the traditional approach
Rising delinquent collection rates are a thorny issue. With personal bankruptcy on the rise again and personal savings at an all time low, collections departments are in a race against competitive lenders to capture their share of the overdue payment. So the ability to quickly create and implement an effective strategy is essential.

However, overzealous collections efforts can lead to both an increase in client attrition, because they can potentially alienate those payees who would be most likely to pay, as well as a reduction in payments. Thus, collection treatment solutions must be intelligent enough to predict the most effective treatment down to the account?not portfolio segment?level. That way they map to the individual propensities of individual debtors. And, they must be implemented efficiently, balancing treatment against operational constraints.

ActionSelect is the market?s only collection treatment optimization solution that meets these needs for speed in deploying effective strategies, precision in predicting the best treatment and consideration of operational constraints.

The value of treatment optimization. Treatment strategies don?t exist in a vacuum. The most appropriate actions must balance business constraints, such as calling capacity and outsourcer costs, with desired outcome. If not, execution of even the best strategies is jeopardized. Using advanced optimization algorithms, ActionSelect is the only solution that accounts for operational constraints in determining optimal treatments. The result is higher collection of outstanding debt, improved resource effectiveness and greater retention benefit.

The importance of precision in assigning treatments. Traditional solutions use general risk scores and time-consuming testing to arrive at an “approximate” treatment strategy. This precludes the ability to then treat individual debtors in the most effective way. ActionSelect, on the other hand, uses account level information to predict the most effective treatment for an individual account.

The importance of time to market. As important, ActionSelect rapidly simulates and tests the new treatment strategies, making it possible to quickly deploy the most effective strategy into production. Other solutions take months or longer to test and deploy, putting collections department behind the collections eight ball. This “deployment gap” can cost companies millions in lost revenue as delinquent payers are lost to collections entirely or make other payment decisions about other debts.

“Financial services customers are getting squeezed by the pressure of competing goals,” said Bob Tate, vice president, Marketing, at Austin Logistics. “They?ve got to reduce revenue losses by collecting more, while lowering the operational cost and time it takes to do that,” said Tate. “It?s a tall order. But ActionSelect more than steps up to the bar by attacking all sides of that equation. It?s the only solution that can predict, optimize, simulate and deploy effective collections strategies in days, not months it traditionally takes.”

For more information about ActionSelect, go to www.austinlogistics.com/products/index.php.