Talgentra's Partnership With Thinkanalytics Will Enable Companies to Cut Level of Bad Debt Write-Off

Bristol, UK – Talgentra is to market and sell ThinkAnalytics’ predictive analytics system as a key module for Tallyman, its customer revenue management and collection system, the company announced today.

Known as ThinkAnalytics Intelligent Enterprise Server (IES), the system is a predictive analytics and data mining platform able to examine vast amounts of data about a company’s customer base and past behaviour. It evaluates this data to provide a clear forecast for the future behaviour of customers – at an individual customer level. This forecast enables users of Tallyman to subsequently adopt the approach most likely to result in the successful collection of a customer debt.

Think IES capabilities will be added to Talgentra’s Tallyman system, which automates the collections process by consolidating all credit-related communications between an organisation and its customers into a single database. Tallyman is used by utilities, telecom service providers, government and public sector organisations, and financial services companies: the one thing they share in common being that they are owed money by customers for loans and credit cards – or they provide services in advance of payment.

When a customer of these companies fails to pay a bill or a loan instalment, their details are transferred from a billing system into Tallyman which enables companies to adopt a more targeted, personalised approach to debt collection. For example, an established customer that usually settles bills on time will not be treated in the same way as a new customer who defaults on their very first payment.

Companies using Think IES will be able to analyse the information stored in Tallyman and other databases relating to customers – covering demographics, financial and employment status, interactions with the company, their behaviour and the circumstances surrounding the settling of the debt. This analysis can then be applied to existing customers, enabling the activity most likely to prompt payment to be initiated immediately – whether it be a particular letter, phone call or other course of action.

Brian Dewis, CEO of Talgentra, said: “Companies are pro-actively looking for ways to cut the level of unpaid customer debt within their businesses – which runs to billions in many industries. Analytic models bring science and greatly increased insight to the decision-making process – and by using Think IES our clients can approach customers in a manner most likely to trigger the successful settling of a debt.”

The Think IES platform has already been trialed by a number of Talgentra clients, who have subsequently asked to move to a full deployment of the system alongside Tallyman.

Think IES is particularly suited to Talgentra’s client base because of its ability to process vast amounts of data at high speeds – and deliver real-time responses, eliminating performance problems that plague traditional data mining products.

Talgentra expects that Think IES will also be of interest to companies using Gentrack, its customer information and billing package developed specifically for the electricity, gas and water markets. Think IES could even be used to increase collection rates for the marketing and churn reduction activities of Gentrack customers.

Eddie Young, CEO of ThinkAnalytics, said: “Talgentra’s customer base could all potentially benefit from the use of intelligent analytics. Reducing bad debt today is critical, but reducing it tomorrow is also important – especially when those numbers run into billions.”