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Automating originations for one of Europe’s leading card issuers

LaSer is one of Europe's largest loyalty and affinity companies specialising in customer relationship management and customer database enhancement. The group has expertise in six complementary businesses including; loyalty, cards, contact centres, point-of-sale services, financial services and affinity solutions.

LaSer's strategy focuses on one simple concept: providing its clients with specialised, bespoke, fully-integrated customer relationships by means of credit and loyalty-enhancement solutions.

Part of the Galeries Lafayette and BNP Paribas groups, LaSer has vast experience in the retail spending and financial services market over the last 30 years and has established a position as the number one proprietary card company in Europe with 20 million customers. The group has operations in several European countries, employing over 9,000 people.

The challenge
LaSer Nederland processes thousands of applications each year which pass through its automated decision system. However, the process had a number of manual elements, including checking customer data, and the high referral rate meant that many routine applications were passing through its team of underwriters. This meant that operational costs for the application process were high, especially when the costs of retrieving external data on every applicant were included. In addition to these operational challenges, the risk team had a strong dependence on the IT department to make changes to the decisioning system. Long lead times, little flexibility and not being given enough priority meant that the team often struggled to make simple and necessary changes to the lending policy and strategy.

The solution
LaSer, as part of a European-wide group, has close links to their counterparts in other markets including France. The French team have been successfully using Experian products and services for many years and were able to endorse Experian as a supplier and in terms of its product. LaSer chose to implement the New Business SM system from Experian which it recognised could deliver the functionality required in terms of automation and flexibility.

The New Business SM system delivered for LaSer is a multi call decisioning system which is seamlessly embedded into their Consumer Credit and Card services application processing system. The fully automated decisioning system takes the information from the application form and accesses multiple internal data sources including existing customer data. An assessment is made to determine whether this data will be sufficient to make a decision, for example in the case of an existing customer. If so, the system does not access the external data sources and incur the associated charges.

Herman Peeters, Head of Risk and Fraud at LaSer Nederland commented. “Experian was chosen as a supplier, not only because we know they can deliver the technology we require, but also because they can, like us, operate on a European basis. Their proven track record, combined with an effective toolset, has exceeded our expectations. We are now on target to reduce our referrals almost to zero, giving us a significant reduction in operational costs while maintaining bad debt levels. And key to the success of the project, our team now has 100% flexibility to manage and develop the operation.”

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