Analytics software firm FICO announced that Crédit Agricole Consumer Finance (CA CF), a leading player in consumer credit in Europe, has seen excellent results using FICO technology to manage customer credit decisions. CA CF deployed FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager in May 2003 to automate collections and recovery decisions for its entire revolving credit portfolio, handling about 200,000 unpaid debts per month. FICO TRIAD Customer Manager had been used successfully at Sofinco, a commercial brand of CA CF in France, for many years, leading to a 30 percent increase in collections productivity.

CA CF provides a wide range of lending products and associated services to consumers, and operates in France principally through the brands Sofinco, Viaxel and Creditlift Courtage. By upgrading its version of FICO TRIAD Customer Manager, CA CF has been even more targeted in its choice of the best treatment for overdue consumers.

"Upgrading FICO TRIAD from version 6 to 8, we can use twice as many decision variables and 10 times as many scenarios, which allows us much greater flexibility in our strategies," said the operations administrator for collections at CA CF Crédit France.  "We will shortly deploy FICO TRIAD on the complete revolving credit customers, which we expect will improve productivity in the whole collections business. We will also benefit from communicating with each customer in a holistic fashion, regardless of the number of records he or she has in our company.”

"FICO TRIAD enables lenders to understand their customers’ risk better, and take more effective treatments across a wide range of decision areas," noted Jean-Michel Schneider, director of FICO France. "CA CF are using TRIAD to perform true customer-level collections, which will help them collect more while improving customer communications."

With FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager, credit grantors can test, automate and improve decisions for credit and debit cards, deposit accounts, loans, auto financing and other credit products. Credit and deposit risk managers and other users can measure customer risk with predictive analytics, set up targeted risk-based strategies, automate a host of decisions using these strategies, and test new "challenger" strategies against their current "champions" to continually improve results.