misc

Portrait Extends Agreements with Fiserv to Deliver Additional Aperio Modules

19 March 2009

Portrait announced today it has added Portrait Campaign Manager and Portrait Customer Analytics to its agreement with Fiserv, the leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, to provide a new and expanded platform in the marketplace.
Fiserv adopted Portrait Foundation to build its Aperio suite of customer interaction applications for retail banking providing financial institutions with a customer centric service and sales platform. With the extension to the agreement, Fiserv is placing a major emphasis on their Aperio suite of products, reflecting its confidence in, and commitment to, Portrait technology.
Fiserv has also agreed with Portrait to distribute new Aperio marketing and sales modules which offer a number of powerful enhancements:
• Advanced customer analytics to drive more precise and effective multi-channel marketing campaigns through intelligent customer segmentation and targeting. The customer analytics enables financial institutions to dynamically score, predict and respond to customer behaviour. With predictive analytics, institutions can increase the rates of return on all inbound and outbound marketing, manage delinquencies, and address customer churn and retention.
• Automated campaign management, which enables marketers to easily design, develop, deploy, monitor and measure their marketing campaigns across all customer communication channels.
• An additional layer of sophisticated analytics around Aperio intelligent prompts that provides real-time modelling and scoring tools. These analytics provide financial institutions with the historical data to create a 360º view of their customer and can be used to analyze customer behaviour and characteristics.
"Fiserv Aperio is the only next-generation sales and service platform for retail banks and these new agreements will increase Portrait's reach globally with an extended customer base using Portrait's technology," said Kieran Kilmartin, global marketing director, Portrait Software.
"Aperio's use of sophisticated predictive analytics and intelligent prompts allows financial institutions to deepen relationships with their customers and increase efficiency," said Carol Cowan, vice president, global marketing and product management, Bank Solutions from Fiserv. "By offering relevant products at the right time banks can create a unique customer experience allowing them to win, retain and delight their most profitable customers. This offering allows our clients to increase relationship value and drive profitability while creating efficiency through integration and business process management."
"Our mutual expectation is that we now have a new and expanded platform for collaboration in the market," said Kilmartin. "The agreement is for our two organizations to collaborate on go-to-market plans and sales for these products which will be distributed under Fiserv's Aperio brand as Powered by Portrait," he added.

www.bobsguide.com

Cattles to cost RBS £500m

23 March 2009

The collapse of troubled lender Cattles will cost Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) up to £500 million (€534 million), according to newspaper reports.

RBS, the lead lender to Cattles – which reported £2.4 billion of outstanding debt in its latest figures – still hopes that it can recover the £500 million, according to the Daily Telegraph.

But in reality it seems highly unlikely that Cattles will be able to meet all of its debt obligations.

“RBS isn’t the only bank to have been caught up in the Cattles debacle,” said an analyst. “But it is the biggest and, since this looks like it will be yet another problem the bank will have to pass on to the taxpayer, it’s another big dent in its reputation and its public image.”

Headed by RBS, Cattles’ 22-bank consortium of lenders also includes HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group.

Last month, Cattles’ sub-prime hire purchase subsidiary, Welcome Financial Services, announced it would stop lending to new customers.

Following a forensic accounting review by Deloitte, the accounting consultancy, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, the law firm, Welcome was found to have under-reported bad debts.

www.leasinglife.co.uk

LendingClub.com secures $12m in financing

20 March 2009

LendingClub.com, the social networking site that matches lenders and borrowers, is set to expand its operations after closing a $12 million round of funding.
The capital raising was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, which joined existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners in backing the site.
Founded by Renaud Laplanche, LendingClub.com allows borrowers with good credit scores to apply for loans at more attractive rates than they would receive through banks or credit card companies.
Lenders can then review the applications and finance specific deals by investing in notes that relate to individual borrower loans. The site funnels the money from lender to borrower, while the lenders take on the risk of the investment and also share in its returns.
Mr Laplanche said the latest financing deal will enable the site to expand its capabilities and customer base.
"Lending Club is proud to be building a network where individuals come together to provide financial value to each other beyond what traditional banks can provide," he commented.
According to the website's statistics, Lending Club borrowers have received over $30.7 million in loans to date.

www.bobsguide.com

LendingClub.com secures $12m in financing

LendingClub.com, the social networking site that matches lenders and borrowers, is set to expand its operations after closing a $12 million round of funding.
The capital raising was led by Morgenthaler Ventures, which joined existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners in backing the site.
Founded by Renaud Laplanche, LendingClub.com allows borrowers with good credit scores to apply for loans at more attractive rates than they would receive through banks or credit card companies.
Lenders can then review the applications and finance specific deals by investing in notes that relate to individual borrower loans. The site funnels the money from lender to borrower, while the lenders take on the risk of the investment and also share in its returns.
Mr Laplanche said the latest financing deal will enable the site to expand its capabilities and customer base.
"Lending Club is proud to be building a network where individuals come together to provide financial value to each other beyond what traditional banks can provide," he commented.
According to the website's statistics, Lending Club borrowers have received over $30.7 million in loans to date.

www.bobsguide.com

Portrait Extends Agreements with Fiserv to Deliver Additional Aperio Modules

Portrait announced today it has added Portrait Campaign Manager and Portrait Customer Analytics to its agreement with Fiserv, the leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, to provide a new and expanded platform in the marketplace.
Fiserv adopted Portrait Foundation to build its Aperio suite of customer interaction applications for retail banking providing financial institutions with a customer centric service and sales platform. With the extension to the agreement, Fiserv is placing a major emphasis on their Aperio suite of products, reflecting its confidence in, and commitment to, Portrait technology.
Fiserv has also agreed with Portrait to distribute new Aperio marketing and sales modules which offer a number of powerful enhancements:
• Advanced customer analytics to drive more precise and effective multi-channel marketing campaigns through intelligent customer segmentation and targeting. The customer analytics enables financial institutions to dynamically score, predict and respond to customer behaviour. With predictive analytics, institutions can increase the rates of return on all inbound and outbound marketing, manage delinquencies, and address customer churn and retention.
• Automated campaign management, which enables marketers to easily design, develop, deploy, monitor and measure their marketing campaigns across all customer communication channels.
• An additional layer of sophisticated analytics around Aperio intelligent prompts that provides real-time modelling and scoring tools. These analytics provide financial institutions with the historical data to create a 360º view of their customer and can be used to analyze customer behaviour and characteristics.
"Fiserv Aperio is the only next-generation sales and service platform for retail banks and these new agreements will increase Portrait's reach globally with an extended customer base using Portrait's technology," said Kieran Kilmartin, global marketing director, Portrait Software.
"Aperio's use of sophisticated predictive analytics and intelligent prompts allows financial institutions to deepen relationships with their customers and increase efficiency," said Carol Cowan, vice president, global marketing and product management, Bank Solutions from Fiserv. "By offering relevant products at the right time banks can create a unique customer experience allowing them to win, retain and delight their most profitable customers. This offering allows our clients to increase relationship value and drive profitability while creating efficiency through integration and business process management."
"Our mutual expectation is that we now have a new and expanded platform for collaboration in the market," said Kilmartin. "The agreement is for our two organizations to collaborate on go-to-market plans and sales for these products which will be distributed under Fiserv's Aperio brand as Powered by Portrait," he added.

www.bobsguide.com

FSA warns bankers

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has warned city bankers to be "very frightened" as it launches a new era of tougher regulation.
Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, signalled the end of light touch regulation and a box-ticking culture within the regulator that had failed to detect severe risks taken by banks such as Northern Rock.
In its place, the regulator will impose a more draconian regime of checks that will include an assessment of banks’ business models, a key feature of regulation that trade bodies such as the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) said had been missing from the FSA.
Sants spoke at a meeting of executives at Thomson Reuters offices in Canary Wharf, London, yesterday.
He said: "There is a view that people are not frightened of the FSA. I can assure you that this is a view I am determined to correct. People should be very frightened of the FSA.
"I continue to believe the majority of market participants are decent people. However, a principles-based approach does not work with individuals who have no principles."
Sants said the regulators would look into the role played by the senior management of institutions that had failed, though he didn’t name specific firms.
The speech follows a warning from Sants at a conference hosted by the National Association of Pension Funds in Canary Wharf earlier this week. He told pension funds that they were partly to blame for the crisis after they failed to exercise oversight of the businesses they own.
He said that shareholders, including pension funds, would need to take their place alongside regulators as a check on the excesses of over-ambitious managers.

www.credittoday.co.uk

FSA to move away from principles-based regulation

Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, says the regulator will be moving away from a principles-based regulation towards a more “outcomes-based regulation".

Sants says: “Historically, the FSA characterised its approach as evidence-based, risk-based and principles-based. We remain, and must remain, evidence- and risk-based but the phrase 'principles-based' has, I think, been misunderstood.”

He says to suggest it can operate on principles alone is illusory particularly because the policy-making framework does not allow it.

He adds: “Furthermore, the limitations of a pure principles-based regime have to be recognised. I continue to believe the majority of market participants are decent people; however, a principles-based approach does not work with individuals who have no principles.”

Sants says what principles-based regulation does mean and should mean, is moving away from prescriptive rules to a higher level articulation of what the FSA expects firms to do.

In other words, it helps emphasise that what really matters is not that any particular box has been ticked but rather that when making decisions, executives know they will be judged on the consequences - the results of those actions.

Sants adds: “If we are an 'outcomes-focused' regulator two questions then arise. Firstly, what do we mean by that? Secondly, how do we deliver it or what is our operating model?

“Explaining what we mean is best achieved by contrasting it with the past. The historical philosophy was that supervision was focused on ensuring that the appropriate systems and controls were in place and relied on management to make the right judgements.”

In the future the FSA will seek to make judgements on the judgements of senior management and take actions if in its view those actions will lead to risks to our statutory objectives.

He adds: “This is a fundamental change. It is moving from regulation based only on observable facts to regulation based on judgements about the future.

“This will of course carry significant risk and our judgements will necessarily not always be correct with hindsight. Furthermore, too aggressive intervention will stifle innovation and arguably reduce risk to a level that inhibits economic prosperity.

"However, I believe the revealed preference of society says that this is, and possibly will always be, what society as a whole expects regulators to be doing. Indeed, it was what they thought we were doing."

www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk

Tesco Personal Finance creates 200 jobs at new Edinburgh HQ

UK supermarket Tesco is set to create 200 new banking jobs at a new Edinburgh headquarters for its financial services business.

The supermarket - which bought out the Royal Bank of Scotland to take complete control of Tesco Personal Finance in December - has signed a 15 year lease on the new headquarters in the Haymarket area of Edinburgh.

Around 250 members of staff will relocate from existing premises in South Gyle, on the city's outskirts, in the second quarter, with a further 200 new recruits set to join them over the next 12 months.

Benny Higgins, chief executive, Tesco Personal Finance, says: "Tesco has made an important step by committing to expanding its financial services business from Scotland. Edinburgh is the ideal place from which to move what is already a successful business into the next stage of its development."

The Scottish Financial Enterprise welcomed the decision to locate the HQ in the city, calling it a "real boost".

The recruitment drive is part of Tesco's plan to extend its financial services business from "collection of successful financial products to that of a full service retail bank".

This week the unit revealed it has almost doubled the amount of money people deposit with it during the past six months and now has around 500,000 savers.

www.finextra.com

Tesco makes hay as battered banks suffer

Tesco is experiencing a rare surge in popularity as it cashes in on the demise of the battered high street banks.

Savings deposits at Tesco Personal Finance, the grocer's banking arm, have almost doubled in the past six months.

More accounts were opened in December of last year than the whole of 2007. It has around 500,000 savings account holders.

Yesterday Tesco unveiled plans to recruit more than 200 finance workers in Edinburgh. Tesco Personal Finance was set up 11 years ago in partnership with Royal Bank of Scotland-But last July the supermarket bought its partner out for £950m and unveiled plans to become a full service retail bank.

Last month finance director Andy Higginson moved over to lead the division that includes Tesco Personal Finance to spearhead an aggressive expansion plan. Britain's biggest retailer reckons it can more than double profits of this division from £400m to £1bn. Much of its recent success is down to its instant access savings account, which, yielding 2.5% in interest, is one of the best in the market.

But experts added that Tesco is now seen as one Britain's most trustworthy companies following the panic caused by Britain's major lenders.

Stephen Cheliotis, chief executive of The Centre for Brand Analysis, said: 'Last summer, there was a lot of negative publicity about Tesco. People were worried it was hurting local businesses, that it was not very ethical. But now all the negative publicity is being poured on the banks. A lot can change in six months.' He said Tesco's financial success - it posted profits of £2.8bn last year - was a key factor for consumers, adding: 'Nobody thinks Tesco is going to go bankrupt.'

www.thisismoney.co.uk