Financial institutions need to improve operational efficiency to better manage debt and arrears functions.
With rising arrears, increasing levels of repossessions and constant pressure on margins there is growing emphasis on reducing costs and improving end-to-end customer service, according to eg, the operations management software company.
Elizabeth Gooch, CEO, stated “We believe it is vital to have the right skills and capabilities in the right place at the right time to provide cross functional capacity so you can do more with the same or less resources.”
“In today’s economic climate the effective performance of your organisation’s debt management and arrears processing operations is vital to your financial wellbeing,” she added. “The information and systems that support these areas need to be accurate, timely and support business agility, to enable the organisation to respond to current and anticipated operating conditions.”
Solutions that deliver a consistent approach to actively managing work, people and processes and improve operational effectiveness will be critical in the months and years ahead, according to eg.
eg argues that faster and more detailed management information will be essential to decision making as the need to view and manage the ‘end-to-end’ admin processes in terms of meeting customer expectations, regulatory requirements, contractual deadlines; and be able to take on more business but not additional cost.
“Our software, the eg operational intelligence® software suite, provides historic, real-time and predictive Operational Management Information about all the factors affecting operational performance. When implemented with our training programme for Managers and Team Leaders to use this intelligence to make the right operational decisions, we guarantee improvements in operational results in short timescales – usually 20 weeks,” stated Elizabeth.
Co-operative Financial Services (CFS), one of the UK’s major financial services and a long-time eg customer, soon realised the benefits from implementing the company’s operational intelligence solution.
The Debt Recovery Department, responsible for processing customer data as well as collecting funds, had few mechanisms to provide integral MI, and therefore no real evidence with which to analyse and improve the business area.
A combination of business growth and interest rate changes had led to an increase in work volumes for the department and the management team wanted to meet the additional business demands by doing more with the resource and skills they had in their teams.
eg helped CFS achieve consistent management and working practices which resulted in improved customer service; reduced operating costs and increased work volumes to be undertaken by the same staff.
The cost savings made possible by eg were considerable. eg promised to deliver a cost benefit of at least 20% to the Debt Recovery department. The actual cost benefit, post go live of the project, was 29% realised through backlog clearance, not replacing leavers and absorbing forecasted volume increases.
Val McCarren, Head of Debt Management, Co-operative Financial Services said: “eg has given us the ability to manage workloads and staff with far greater accuracy and predictability, which has made the department work smarter and costs have been significantly reduced. Everything promised at the outset of the project has been achieved, and more!”
To read the case study which details the work eg undertook with The Co-operative Financial Services Debt Management department, click here.