Zoot Enterprises Hosts Successful Executive Forum on Consumer Risk
Attendees presented with best practice methods for successfully mitigating risk
October 23, 2008
BOZEMAN, Mont—Zoot Enterprises, a leading provider of advanced instant credit decisioning and loan origination solutions recently hosted an executive forum in Chicago entitled, “Consumer Risk in a New Environment.”
Consumers’ financial behavior has changed drastically over the past 18 months based on changes in the economy. Couple those changes with the current market environment, including the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the acquisition of Merrill Lynch and the bail out of AIG and the ability to successfully predict consumer behavior to mitigate risk becomes an increasingly daunting task for financial executives.
“We attended the Zoot Executive Forum to get a better sense for recent developments in the automotive finance landscape. The information and perspective shared by industry experts and the dialogue between fellow attendees was enriching and insightful. The forum provided a unique opportunity to share ideas among peers and engage in thought-provoking discussions about the ongoing challenges we face in today's market. The event exceeded our expectations,” stated Anoop Tiwari, Director, Strategy and Business Development of cars.com.
Attendees of Zoot’s executive forum were presented with an overview of the current market, an analysis of how the market spiraled to current conditions and strategies for success including best practices for analyzing consumer behavior, predicting risk and improving loss mitigation policies.
Bobbie Britting, a Research Director in TowerGroup’s Consumer Lending practice – the leading research and advisory service firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry – examined emerging trends that will impact businesses and how lenders will respond. “The consumer lending industry is under severe pressure; lender income is deteriorating, loss rates are surging, and loan and sales volumes are dropping. And we can expect to see even more regulation come out of the current credit crisis,” stated Britting. “It’s important for lenders to take advantage of the consumer data that you have, share information across divisions within your institution and utilize new data sources to help your institution make good loans.”
“Best practice strategies for mitigating risk, including incorporating alternative data into decisioning processes, utilizing champion/challenger testing and implementing innovative technology with the speed and control to effectively manage risk is extremely important in today’s market,” said Tom Johnson, VP of product development for Zoot. “Good lending opportunities are still out there. A flexible system tailored to meet an institution’s unique business needs allows the institution to do more with less and implement new scoring capabilities quickly to respond to market changes.”
The Forum concluded with case study examples of successful risk mitigation strategies implemented by a top-10 financial institution and a leading online payments provider. The payments provider uses realtime tools to tighten and loosen its fraud policy on a daily basis. This not only enables business users to react quickly to manage fraud risk, but also take advantage of new market opportunities before competitors. Because of the high incidence of online fraud this capability is crucial to their business.
About Zoot
Bozeman, Mont.-based Zoot Enterprises provides credit decisioning and loan origination solutions through a configurable, scalable and reliable platform to large and innovative U.S. financial services institutions. Visit http://www.zootweb.com or call 406.556.7555 for more information.
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