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African Bank (www.africanbank.co.za) is the leader in South Africa’s large unsecured credit market. With 419 branches and 1.8 million customers African Bank has an advances book totalling 20 billion rand (R).

African Bank is one of the first companies to provide unsecured loans to the under served population of South Africa, and recognises its responsibility to them. The provision of credit can have a significant impact on society in a country where, for many years, most of the population had a wage and cash based existence, without access to financial products and credit.

African Bank’s offerings have evolved over the years from a standard payroll deduction loan, to individual retail debit order loans that incorporate and allow greater risk and price segmentation for the bank.

A combination of portfolio growth and the desire to adopt a more sophisticated approach to risk management, led the Bank to recognise the need for a new collections management system. Following an extensive vendor evaluation, African Bank chose and implemented Experian’s Tallyman collections system as it exceeded all the evaluation criteria.

Tallyman now plays a key role in the collections management strategy of the bank, enabling the bank to manage delinquency, maximising recoveries and minimising write-off.

In 2008 the Bank acquired the retailer Ellerines and has boosted the retailer’s competitiveness by utilising African bank’s credit underwriting ability to offer furniture products on credit. The organisational and portfolio growth meant that the Bank needed to be able to manage an increased number of accounts, and therefore more delinquent customers, as well as integrating Ellerines’ systems and processes into African Bank.

African Bank is in the process of implementing Tallyman into the Ellerines organisation with the aim of standardising and integrating collections processes between the two businesses, this is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

On completion of the integration with Ellerines, it is anticipated that the group will have in excess of 3 million accounts and 700 concurrent Tallyman users. This will represent a substantial rise from the currently figures of 1.8 million accounts and 300 concurrent users for the Tallyman application.

For African Bank, Tallyman enables the bank to manage and streamline the collections operation. A variety of different IT systems are used to manage the granting and administration of a loan. However, as soon as a customer defaults on a payment their information is automatically transferred to Tallyman. African Bank has also developed a number of collections scorecards and utilises Tallyman to implement the strategies identified by the respective scorecards.

George Roussos, Executive, Collections at African Bank, said:"Experian’s Tallyman collections system exceeded our expectations when it was first implemented in African Bank, and has continued to effectively contribute to the success of our collections operation."

“With the significant portfolio growth from our acquisition, it was critical we continued our advanced approach to collections management.  We knew we already had the capability and we knew it had the flexibility to deliver at a larger scale. Tallyman is now working across our new, larger organisation and it is expected that further benefits will be achieved once implemented"

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