UK Collection Agency Selects Equifax Locate for Skip Tracing

Debt collection agency and credit management specialist, Clarity Credit Management Solutions, is harnessing the consumer credit analytics expertise of Equifax, combined with its market-leading tracing tool, Equifax Locate, to enhance its collections strategy.

Working with Clarity and using a consultative approach, Equifax has developed a new utility which enables the creation of tailor-made segmentation models, which when coupled with Equifax Locate has enabled Clarity to significantly improve its collections performance. Equifax has been able to create a series of segments for Clarity to identify how likely customers are to pay and therefore enable the collections agency to direct resources effectively.

“Clarity has been providing innovative credit management services to lenders since 2005, with a focus on low cost, quality collections”, says Laurence Rix, Corporate Service Director for Clarity.

“However, we have been keen to drive up the efficiency of our collections processes even further and by working with Equifax, utilising its innovative data analytics and Locate tracing tools, we have been able to do just that. It was critical that we could identify the accounts most and least likely to pay in order to more effectively focus our resources; but our existing collections scorecard was limited because it only utilised our own data.”

Tackling this challenge, Equifax added a segmentation utility to Equifax Locate, taking publicly available credit data and combining it with scores, to create five segments for Clarity. The top segment includes the most likely to pay, whilst the bottom segment features the least likely. Crucially, the Equifax segmentation is flexible enough to integrate with Clarity’s existing data, with the result that it has been able to significantly enhance collections performance for Clarity clients.

“Equifax recognised that we needed a solution that didn’t require significant additional resource from us to implement” continued Laurence Rix. “It therefore offers a seamless exchange of files to and from Clarity for the segmentation process, thereby making it easy to deploy in the Clarity business.”

“The flexibility of the Equifax tool also means that intelligence-based segmentation can be combined with Clarity customer data for the greatest collections performance. Putting the customer data into segments means we can tailor collections actions by segment, thereby increasing the level of returns for outbound activity.”

Barnaby Tompkins, Business Development Manager for Equifax Debtor Management Solutions added, “Our new segmentation solution, which has been integrated with Locate, has already improved collection rates for Clarity and provides an excellent model for other Equifax customers. Clarity has been able to make more informed decisions, using Locate’s segmenting utility, helping to increase collection rates, while reducing costs, by targeting those most likely to pay.”

“Equifax Locate, coupled with Equifax’s consultancy and analytics expertise, offers our clients a way of easily bringing intelligence to a tracing and /or collections operation. We provide a managed service that can be tailored to the specific needs of our customers, allowing them to easily upgrade when they want to improve their segmentation. Clarity is now in the process of developing its collections strategies to more fully exploit the new Equifax segmentation and Locate utility, benefiting from its flexibility to make changes easily and add data to further increase collections rates.”

Equifax is a global leader in consumer and commercial information solutions, providing businesses of all sizes and consumers with information they can trust. We organize and assimilate data on more than 500 million consumers and 81 million businesses worldwide, and use advanced analytics and proprietary technology to create and deliver customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers. Headquartered in Atlanta, Equifax operates in four continents and 15 countries, is a member of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500® Index. Its common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EFX.