By:Wendy Greenawalt
In my last few blogs, I have discussed how optimizing decisions can be leveraged across an organization while considering the impact those decisions have to organizational profits, costs or other business metrics. In this entry, I would like to discuss how this strategy can be used in optimizing 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. 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, and internal resources remain flat. Due to this, organizations of all sizes are looking for ways to improve efficiency and decisions while minimizing costs. Optimization is an ideal solution to this problem.
Optimized strategy trees can be easily implemented into current processes and 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 a given strategy 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.
