Retail & Specialised Lending Sector
Optimised credit solutions across the entire customer lifecycle
We offer a full-service solution
Starting with consultants that advise on applicable risk strategies, software solutions that operationalise the strategies and finally a comprehensive suite of analytical solutions and execution capabilities, all of which combine to provide your business with leading edge solutions.
Whether the need is for a solution pertaining to only specific areas in the lifecycle, or an end-to-end lifecycle solution, our credit solutions span across the entire customer lifecycle and are tailored to meet the specific customer demand.
Our solutions cover
- Customer Acquisition
- Customer Origination
- Account Management
- Collections
- Industry Benchmarking Reports
- IFRS9 Modelling Solutions
Customer acquisitions
We offer a variety of services to drive new acquisitions. Our consumer profile leads solution offers high-quality, opted-in intelligent leads. These leads are profiled for propensity to respond to an offer and for risk profile enabling our clients to select only the highest quality of prospects. The key to all this our access to the latest contact information, superior data sources and the utilisation of machine learning algorithms. For customer with existing leads we provide analytical services to improve response, uptake and risk.
We also offer various channels to support customer leads campaigns including SMS, email and more recently, a chatbot conversation.
While the above are standalone products, our solutions also include a combination of a number of these offerings, based on customer requirements.
Customer originations
Our originations solutions incorporate an account originations system that allows for the onboarding of new retail credit customers. Principa’s decision engine DecisionSmart enables complex automatic decisioning utilising scorecards, policy rules and terms of business tables, amongst other features. Our API hub, BridgeSmart, enables connectivity to webservices both internal to the organisation and external.
We have been building credit strategies for retailers for more than 20 years. This includes credit scorecards, policy rules, affordability calculations and profit-based credit limit setting.
Our advisory team has worked alongside prominent South African retailers to create risk and profit-based lending strategies for each key customer segment, whilst ensuring the strategy meets all regulatory and governance requirements.
Account management
Our account processing system Financier™ offers retailers an exceptional platform for managing retail credit. Financier™ has been deployed at a number of global high street stores offering simple and complex retail products.
Principa’s DecisionSmart enables retailers to deploy account management strategies including authorisations, credit limit management, existing customer marketing, predelinquency and collections. DecisionSmart also houses the behavioural scorecards, enabling the business to benefit from the foresight gained from the consumers’ purchasing and payment behaviour.
We are extensively experienced in:
- building and managing account management strategies using either profit and risk-based strategy designs, or mathematical optimisation techniques
- account management strategies based on credit behavioural data and credit bureau data
- building and managing champion/challenger strategies including the important task of running “randomisation”. This incorporates ensuring that champion and challenger groups are similar across all key metrics
A key challenge faced by many lenders is not being able to harness customer and transactional data for the purpose of bringing about insight and produce foresight. Our data management platform Stratus allows lenders to clean data, link the data and then aggregate it from a range of sources. This data is then ready for behavioural scoring or for reporting within a dashboard.
Collections
Our collections solutions starts with our popular collections management system CollectSmart. In addition, we offer other software such as our collections virtual assistant Agent X and our self-service collection bot, Atura. As collections becomes more sophisticated, we see many of our customers introducing a large suite of machine learning scores into the collections environment. These include probability of default, probability of breaking a promise, probability of RPC, probability of connect, right time to call, escalate to legal, optimal settlement, optimal instalment, and more. Our machine learning platform Stratus enables the deployment and execution of these models, supercharging a retail collection strategy.
We also offer our suite of consulting services, presenting our customers with several unique offerings. An assessment is made of all aspects of the collections environment including software, strategy, people, process, analytics and reporting, and the customer is provided a road map on how to improve its collections environment.
Industry benchmarking reports
A highlight of our services offering is our retail industry benchmarking report, Credit Compass. We measure retailers against each other to determine their performance across originations, account management and collections, incorporating both behavioural data and bureau data. Retailers are able to assess whether trends experienced are in line with the industry or not, providing a very unique perspective on the credit book’s performance. The benchmarking report is highly valuable to our customers and has even featured in multiple annual reports.
IFRS9 modelling
We assist retailers in building and managing their IFRS 9 provision models. Services range from model review, model building (including PD, LGW, run-off triangles and economic models), audit support and IFRS 9 mentorship. More information is provided under our IFRS 9 product offering.
