In recent years, consumer credit has grown to new heights of popularity, as loans and mortgages are used, not just for necessities, but to supplement household income and improve the general standard of living. As a result, the financial sector is forced to write off millions each year in non-performing loans. Not surprisingly, many banks are now actively looking for systems and techniques that keep revenue recovery rates high and minimise their risk levels.

In 2005, we decided to overhaul our existing systems for managing customers in arrears and implement best practice. The aim of this was to help us increase recovery rates, decrease the number of defaulting customers and ensure that both us and our customers were not financially over-committed, plus meeting the requirements of Basel II and The European Duty of Care Directive.

We selected the Tallyman Debt Management solution from Experian - a specialist collections management solution that enables us to automate and streamline the collections process.

After an extensive period of testing on a subset of accounts, in March 2007, Tallyman went live with the collections module available in the Czech language. Tallyman is integrated with Česká’s Retail Banking System, a data warehouse and standard reporting platform, and is the main information system for our collections department, providing a complete overview of customers in arrears on current accounts and a subset of loan accounts.

"The benefits of the Tallyman system include improved profits and increased working capital, reduced bad debt and write-off, plus the facility to rehabilitate customers more quickly..."

The benefits of the Tallyman system include improved profits and increased working capital, reduced bad debt and write-off, plus the facility to rehabilitate customers more quickly so that they can return to a positive profit contribution.
Our collections department also saw improved levels of efficiency through reduced administrative costs and headcount.

Tallyman is a key part of Česká Spořitelna’s long term strategy to improve the collections process and results across its range of banking products. It is planned to extend Tallyman to cover credit cards, mortgages, branch-based personal loans, SME (Small & Medium Sized Enterprise) loans and Giro accounts.

Our challenge has always been to efficiently manage our delinquent customers whilst maintaining our reputation for excellent customer service. Tallyman allowed us to automate and streamline the collections activities but it also gives us the ability to accurately determine the right approach for each customer. This means we can collect more debt from more customers, more quickly, significantly improving the efficiency of our collections activity, whilst reducing the level of debtwritten off.

Harald Walitsch
Chief Credit Risk Officer Retail
Česká Spořitelna

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