By: Wendy Greenawalt
In my last few blogs, I have discussed how optimization can be leveraged to make improved decisions across an organization while considering the impact that opimizing decisions have to organizational profits, costs or other business metrics. In this entry, I would like to discuss how optimization is used to improve decisions at the point of acquisition, while minimizing costs.
Determining the right account terms at inception is increasingly important due to recent regulatory legislation such as the Credit Card Act. Doing so plays a role in assessing credit risk, relationship managment, and increasing out of wallet share. These regulations have established guidelines specific to consumer age, verification of income, teaser rates and interest rate increases. Complying with these regulations will require changes to existing processes and creation of new toolsets to ensure organizations adhere to the guidelines. These new regulations will not only increase the costs associated with obtaining new customers, but also the long term revenue and value as changes in account terms will have to be carefully considered.
The cost of on-boarding and servicing individual accounts continues to escalate while internal resources remain flat. Due to this, organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to improve efficiency and decisions while minimizing costs. Optimizing decisions is an ideal solution to this problem.
Optimized strategy trees (trees that optimize decisioning strategies) can be easily implemented into current processes to ensure lending decisions adhere to organizational revenue, growth or cost objectives as well as regulatory requirements. Optimized strategy trees enable organizations to create executable strategies that provide on-going decisions based upon optimization conducted at a consumer level. Optimized strategy trees outperform manually created trees as they are created utilizing sophisticated mathematical analysis and ensure organizational objectives are adhered to.
In addition, an organization can quantify the expected ROI of decisioning strategies and provide validation in strategies – before implementation. This type of data is not available without the use of a sophisticated optimization software application. By implementing optimized strategy trees, organizations can minimize the volume of accounts that must be manually reviewed, which results in lower resource costs. In addition, account terms are determined based on organizational priorities leading to increased revenue, retention and profitability.
