Tallyman is Experian Decision Analytics' market leading solution for debt management. The software successfully manages more than 20 million customers and collects more than £1.25 billion ($2.5 billion) of debt worldwide on behalf of more than 40 high profile clients including African Bank in South Africa, ABN AMRO in the Netherlands, Bank of Queensland in Australia, Tata Teleservices in India and British Gas in the UK.

Tallyman is a sophisticated, highly configurable software solution for managing the collection of customer debt. Specifically designed for consumer credit lenders, or organisations which extend consumer credit as part of their business model, the solution ensures that payment arrears are minimised, the volume of cash collected is increased and customers are better managed and retained for future business opportunities.

The Tallyman solution streamlines the collections process, reduces bad debt write-offs, improves cash flow, reduces provisioning and cures more customers, which improves customer relationships and facilitates future selling opportunities.

Tallyman's unique value lies in its its ability to segment customers in arrears in the same way in which marketing departments segment customers and prospects using CRM systems - which is particularly vital in industries where each case of arrears needs to be managed in an appropriate and sensitive manner.

Tallyman enables you to implement powerful functionality which helps you to achieve your business goals, evaluate collection strategies to achieve the best performance, and continuously improve the processes in place.

Implement

Tallyman provides its users with the necessary tools to implement fully integrated, end-to-end collections processes with highly flexible user applications and highly efficient and sophisticated automation.

Evaluate

Tallyman provides the ability to evaluate the performance of the implemented collection processes using highly visual interactive real-time performance dashboards, and highly flexible and powerful management information through a suite of defined collections reports.

Improve

Tallyman provides its users with the tools to easily and rapidly improve the implemented processes over time. Improvements are made using the intuitive drag-and-drop graphical user interfaces and provide analysis and simulation tools such as champion challenger, ‘what if' simulators and trial or sand pit environments to minimse the risks of changes and to maximise the benefits.

Organisations around the world are seeing the benefits of a Tallyman solution in increased revenue collection, reduced debt write-off, reduced risk and increased cash flow, as well as achieving a return on investment in typically less than 12 months.

The Experian Annual Conference is a long-established and highly regarded industry event that brings together industry experts from South Africa and around the globe to share their insights on today's most pertinent credit topics. The Experian Conference will take place from the 19 - 21 September 2007 at Zimbali Lodge, KwaZulu Natal.

We have an exciting line-up of speakers this year which includes Richard Fiddis from Experian Group who will discuss the growing credit opportunities in emerging markets, as well as Andre Hattingh of VISA CEMEA who will present a VISA case-study on the successful roll-out of its products into South Africa and across the African continent.

Phil Nolan, Director of Bureau Centre of Excellence at Experian will present on Applications of credit bureau ‘value added products' in creating competitive advantage. We are pleased to have Dr Azar Jammine back at the Experian conference this year to talk about South Africa's dependence on global economy, consumer spending after the NCA and the skills shortage.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to leverage from industry experts, register today! The registration deadline is the 17th of August 2007.

Experian, the global information solutions company, has acquired The pH Group, a leading business-to-business analytics company. The pH Group has offices in London and Paris and operates across several European countries.

Founded in 1987, the pH Group assists organisations in understanding their customer base, identifying new business opportunities and competitive performance benchmarking . Focusing on business-to-business analytics, the pH Group delivers tailor-made data models across a wide range of industry sectors to predict propensity to buy, default risk and likely future growth, as well as database tools for the matching, cleaning, enhancement and management of data.

The pH Group will be known as pH, an Experian company following the acquisition and will operate within Experian's Business Information division. It will continue to operate from its offices in London and Paris and complement Experian's existing portfolio of business information and B2B marketing solutions, which enable organisations to make key business decisions about targeting, acquiring and retaining profitable customers.

Announcing the acquisition, Tiku Patel, Managing Director of Experian UK & Ireland, said: "The pH Group has a tremendous reputation in the industry for data analytics and its skills base is a great strategic fit with Experian as we seek to bring intelligent analytics and data sources to a wider client base.

"This acquisition reinforces Experian's position and commitment to developing the very best in value-added business information and B2B marketing solutions. We believe this acquisition will bring considerable benefits to clients of both Experian and pH and will enable us to build on pH's modelling, analytics and data capabilities, while at the same time, looking to enhance its data sources and solutions to meet the needs of the future.”

Rolf Hickmann, Managing Director of pH, added: "Experian's business information data has been an integral part of our analytics and business information offering for many years. As a result, our clients have already benefited from Experian's data.

“Now, as a part of the Experian Group, we will have even greater access to its information, expertise and investment in order to share and increase our knowledge to deliver even more solutions and innovation for the wider B2B industry.”

The pH Group's interests in the joint ventures of ProspectSpace and InterRisk are not included in this acquisition.

	Embarking upon the path to true customer level risk management and decision-making is a step not to be taken lightly, but the benefits in terms of decision quality, improved customer service and bottom-line contribution are now being recognised by many organisations.

The proliferation of financial service products offered by retail banks, and the fundamental strategic objective to widen and deepen the number of product relationships with the customer, has thrown the limitations of product-based decision management strategies into sharp relief. Banking organisations have tended to develop on a “silo” or product-level basis, with risk (and other) managers within each silo being responsible for decision-making, scoring and strategies for their silo alone.

Whilst this gives clear line of sight to roles, responsibilities and objectives at the product level, it has often led to a confusion on approaches to decision-making for customers when looking across their silos. Inconsistent decisions, mis-communication with the customer and mixed messages are an all too frequent result of this approach.

By taking a single view of the customer, restricted to a single account, and its performance, account level risk management has the advantage of clarity and focus for the Risk manager. However, one man's ‘focus' is another man's ‘failure to see the bigger picture' of the customer relationship as a whole. The fact is that a customer's performance on their current account gives the organisation meaningful insights into the customer's likely performance on their credit card or their personal loan, and vice versa. And yet, how many organisations take the full customer view into consideration when making credit risk and other decisions and interacting with their customers?

The principle behind customer level decision-making involves the adoption of an holistic view of the customer, derived by looking across trading performance on all product relationships, and to transform these insights into actionable decisions across all the organisation's customer touchpoints. This will deliver consistent treatments to the customer, and offers a range of benefits: the ability to cross-sell/up-sell new products and relationships to customers based on the strength of their overall existing relationship, and the ability to rein in lending on those customers running into difficulties on any of their existing relationships.

Customer level decision-making is not for everyone: businesses with limited product lines will receive diminished returns, purely because the number of multiple product relationships in their portfolio is small. Even in these situations however, there is the potential to enhance the customer view by reference to external data sources such as credit bureau data. In some cases the organisation may have limited product lines but allows multiple instances of the product per customer.

Customer level decision-making has gained something of a ‘Holy Grail' character over the years, in the sense that businesses recognise that it is a desirable objective which may ultimately be unobtainable because of the organisational and structural obstacles which have to be surmounted. It is true that developing a customer level decision strategy requires a considerable amount of planning and effort if it is to be carried out successfully; however a successful development will carry with it many benefits for the enterprise concerned.

Written by John Worthington, Senior Business Analyst, Experian Decision Analytics.

	In October 2006, Experian published its first ever Victims of Fraud Dossier, in which it revealed the results of an extensive research project that sought to highlight key identity fraud trends in the UK by looking into the experiences of identity fraud victims who had benefited from contact with Experian’s Victims of Fraud service between July 2003 and June 2006.

This document updates the dossier with findings from 2,124 new victims that first contacted Experian between July and December 2006, as well as additional insight from Experian’s fraud prevention business around how identity fraud is moving into the realm of organised crime.

The rate at which new victims are contacting Experian continues to grow. 2,124 victims contacted Experian’s Victims of Fraud team for the first time in the second half of 2006. This represents a 69% per cent year-on-year increase in identity fraud activity being reported to Experian.

The wealth of the UK’s top salaried professionals, directors and business owners, who often live in the most exclusive city flats and residences, makes them prime targets for identity thieves, who use a variety of techniques to target them.

In most cases, although there is a cost to victims in terms of distress and time spent reclaiming their identity, most victims do not suffer a direct financial loss as a result of a fraud being perpetrated in their name – the financial loss is borne by the companies involved. Mail order companies were by far the hardest hit in terms of fraud volumes, accounting for approximately 60 per cent of total cases. In terms of actual value, the biggest losses were suffered by credit card and store card issuers.

The NCR launches the National Consumer Tribunal

The first public announcement regarding the structure of the National Consumer Tribunal was revealed at a NCR hosted conference, ‘Taming the National Credit Act', at the Indaba Hotel in Johannesburg on 25 July 2007. The conference was attended by members of the National Credit Regulator, the ombudsmen for banking services and credit information as well as credit bureaux, credit grantors and debt collectors.

The National Consumer Tribunal was established in terms of the National Credit Act 34 of 2005 and is tasked ‘to adjudicate on applications brought before it and allegations of prohibited practice made in terms of the National Credit Act and referred by the National Credit Regulator.' In a presentation at the conference, Diane Terblanche, an Independent Consumer Protection Consultant and the Chairperson of the National Consumer Tribunal presented the way forward for the Tribunal.

According to Terblanche's presentation, the composition of the Tribunal is as follows:

Furthermore the following matters fall within the jurisdiction of the National Consumer Tribunal:

The Tribunal can make the following orders:

In addition, the NCR can bring the following to the Tribunal:

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