Banque Accord Plays the SAS® Card to Control its Credit Risk

A subsidiary of international retail giant Auchan, Banque Accord is Auchan's electronic banking service, collecting all payments made by bank cards, checks or proprietary cards. Banque Accord issues millions of proprietary cards, as well as its own Visa and MasterCard bank cards. It also offers its customers consumer credit, personal loans, savings products, life insurance and other insurance products for private individuals. Given such an array of financial activities, Banque Accord turned to SAS to implement a decision-making system for managing its credit risk.

With 570 employees, Banque Accord has offices in six countries and serves 3 million European customers. In France, home to two-thirds of its clientele, it issues proprietary cards for Auchan, Atac, Alinéa, Leroy Merlin and the Val d'Europe mall. Today, more than 6,000 points of sale accept cards from the Banque Accord network as payment.

SAS satisfies the risk experts
Banque Accord has developed a wide range of offerings in recent years: payment cards, lines of credit and personal loans for home improvement, auto purchases and other items. Additional offerings include low-cost telephone service and magazine subscriptions. Because such rapid expansion has appreciably increased its outstanding payables, Banque Accord wanted tools to improve customer segmentation and daily risk management.

Personalized service for every customer
As with any other financial institution, Banque Accord's priority is to assess risks using the most discriminating decision-making system possible. In such a system, risk analysts develop scoring scales by looking at the past and analyzing correlations between how customers initially described their situations and actual events that followed.

The company uses these scoring scales to define a customer's profile based on past activity. It then adapts offers to that customer's capacities and needs. It uses similar profiles during the collection process to develop personalized methods for handling outstanding debts; Banque Accord may choose to send a personalized letter, place a call to the customer from a call center or carry the late payment over to the following month, for example.

Information in the decision-support system comes from an operational system consisting of a management back-office, an electronic banking platform and a multichannel access platform onto which Banque Accord has transferred some of its services: banking at home (via the Internet or Audiotel), Internet payment, interactive telephone and computer coupling that optimizes call centers consultants' effectiveness.

To continually improve the quality and professionalism of its analyses, Banque Accord used SAS to develop a decision-support system into which operating data are loaded daily. Explains Information Systems Director Dominique Jasinski, "Our various data marts allow us to monitor the effectiveness of the scores and report our credit activity to senior management. This lets us monitor the changes in risk by type of product, thus enabling us to manage the company's overall risk. Reporting, development of scoring scales and cyclical calculation of the scores are entirely based on SAS Solutions."

More users at a lower cost
Based on its initial success, Banque Accord decided in 2002 to extend the SAS solution to more employees, enabling them to perform analyses and prepare reports more easily. To achieve that expansion, the information technology department chose SAS Enterprise Guide. "Our first reason," notes Jasinski, "was the cost. With SAS Enterprise Guide, we were able to increase the number of licenses and allow a new category of users who are not SAS programmers to make requests and prepare their activity reports."

Two types of users are now using the SAS solution:

• Risk and marketing experts, who extract information from the database to prepare data marts on their own. In this way, they can work each data model and improve customer profiles.
• Users of other services, who make requests in the data marts based on their needs. They easily use SAS Enterprise Guide, in particular to prepare standard reports or conduct periodic studies of their activity.

Resulting productivity gains
According to Banque Accord, SAS Enterprise Guide allowed the company to achieve an economy of scale by increasing the number of users at a fixed cost. Users have declared their satisfaction, describing benefits that include:

• Easy-to-generate tables, statistics and graphics.
• Reusable code.
• Better presentation of results.
• Intuitive requests and selections.
• Transparent data sources.
• Integration with Microsoft Windows, so results can easily be reused.

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