Some of you may be thinking finally we get to the meat of the matter.  Yes the decision strategies are extremely important when we talk about small business/business banking.  Just remember how we got to here though, we had to first define:

• Who are we going to pursue in this market segment?
• How are we going to pursue this market segment - part 1 &  part 2?
• What are we going to require of the applicants to request the funds?

Without the above, we can create all the decision strategies we want but...

-- by Veronica Herrera

For as long as there have been loans, there has been credit risk and risk management. In the early days of US banking, the difficulty in assessing risk meant that lending was severely limited, and many people were effectively locked out of the lending system. Individual review of loans gave way to numerical scoring systems used to make more consistent credit decisions, which later evolved into the statistically derived models we know today. Use of credit scores is an...

- by Joel Pruis

Probably the first debate with information requirements is whether or not to collect financial statements on the business.  There has been much heartburn by the commercial lending traditionalists with the common practice not to collect financial information for a certain segment of the small business applicants.  Great relief was felt by these traditionalists after the 2008 small business portfolio...

Just to recap from Part I – The $500 million to $20 Billion asset size financial institution lost significant ground from 2006 to 2010 while those with assets greater than $20 billion held steady and those smaller than $500 million and the credit unions improved significantly. Also, the focus provided by the business banker (or whatever title used to describe this role) will generate the most number of applications per FTE of any role.

Part II - Field resources pursuing small...

-by Joel Pruis

Basic segmentation strategy for business banking asks the following questions:

No One Size Fits All

The notion of a single definition for small business for any financial institution is inappropriate as the intent for segmentation...

Fraudsters are attacking organizations from new and unexpected directions. For telecommunications companies to remain profitable, they must continue to be vigilant with fraud management activities. The Communications Fraud Control Association sponsors educational events for helping companies combat the new fraud and revenue protection challenges that continue to emerge worldwide.

The following article was originally posted Wednesday, June 22, 2011 by Matt Ehrlich on the Fraud and Identity Solutions blog....

-by Matt Ehrlich

The Communications Fraud Control Association’s annual meeting and educational event was held last week (June 14 – 16) at the Allerton hotel in Chicago, IL.   The Communications Fraud Control Association is made up of communications and security professionals, fraud investigators, analysts, and managers, law enforcement, those in risk management, and many others.   As an organization, they started out as a small group of communications professionals from the major long...

Later this month, at TRMA’s 2011 Summer conference in San Francisco, U.S. Cellular’s John Stevenson will facilitate a panel discussion by industry experts entitled “How to Make a First-Party Program Successful.”

Topics will include: roll-out, how to measure success, criteria in choosing a partner, experience around unsuccessful ventures and how to turn it around; training/recruiting (internal versus external).

Panel – How to Make a 1st Party Program Successful
Moderated by: John Stevenson, U.S....

- by Matt Ehrlich

At Experian’s recent client conference, Vision 2011, there was a refreshing amount of positive discussion and outlook on origination rates and acquisition strategies for growth. This was coming not only from industry analysts participating in the conference but from clients as well. As a consumer, I’d sensed the ‘cautious optimism’ that we keep hearing about because my mailbox(the ‘original’ one, not email) has slowly been getting more and more credit card offer letters over...

-- by Kennis Wong

Data is the very core of fraud detection. We are constantly seeking new and mining existing data sources that give us more insights into consumers’ fraud and identity theft risk. Here is a way to categorize the various data sources.

Account level - When organizations detect fraud, naturally they leverage the data in-house. This type of data is usually from the individual account activities such as transactions, payments, locations or types of purchases, etc. For example, if...