China?s Top Credit Card Issuer Chooses Collection Management Tool from ALI Solutions

AUSTIN, Texas–ALI Solutions™ ("ALI"), the leading provider of Intelligent Decision Automation solutions, announced that China Merchants Bank (“CMB”) is the first bank in China to license ALI’s OnQ™ to automate and centralize collections campaign and strategy management while ensuring call rule compliance. OnQ is used by nine of the top ten US credit card issuers in the U.S. and processes over 500 million records per month. 

CMB, one of China’s top credit card issuers and “The Best Bank in China” according to Euromoney magazine, will use OnQ in its collections operation to automate and centralize campaign and strategy management while improving the performance of their outbound contact strategies. With OnQ, CMB can better utilize its collection resources, confidently maintain low delinquency rate and be more profitable in their credit card operations.

Michael Wei, chief risk officer for CMB credit card center, said, “OnQ takes the productivity enhancing qualities of CMB’s auto-dialers to a much higher level and it lets us truly manage our outbound customer assistance staff on a real-time basis. We will use it to better coordinate our calling strategies across multiple sites for centralized control and to more effective implementations in times of contingency. During special circumstances such as disasters or other emergencies, we can immediately, for example, suspend our calls and later, when the emergency has passed, offer affected customers special repayment arrangements."

Tom Miller, chief executive officer of ALI Solutions, says, “What we are seeing at CMB and elsewhere in China banking is an industry, largely unburdened by rigid legacy systems and reliance on stagnant information, setting the pace globally for daily, dynamic management of risk and collections at the individual level. Banks in China are rapidly adopting state-of-the-art solutions that recognize that credit risk has ‘two faces’. There is the risk of not being repaid, but also a risk of failing to extend credit to credit-worthy customers at a time when the consumer credit market is expanding rapidly. ”

Pan Feng, managing director of ALI Solutions’ China operations, added “With the recent implementation of OnQ and the current implementation of Vincio enterprise decision engine, CMB has become ALI’s largest customer in the Asia Pacific region and a strategic partner in the China market. We look forward to a long and rewarding partnership with CMB.”

According to the Boston market research firm Celent, the rapidly growing Chinese credit card market has a 2010 potential market of more than 200 million consumers. Despite aggressive growth in the past few years, CMB’s credit card portfolio has one of the lowest charge-off and delinquency rates, even lower than neighboring mature markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore. Revolving credit usage in China is at a healthy level. These conditions create strong incentive for Chinese banks to manage risk and collections effectively at the individual level, tightening policies where appropriate but also loosening them where risk is low.

About ALI Solutions
ALI Solutions ("ALI") provides Intelligent Decision Automation applications that empower consumer financial services organizations to preemptively manage risk and improve profitability. ALI’s solutions automate the fusion of transaction data with third party data sources to dynamically execute credit, fraud and collections policies that solve immediate business problems while easily adapting to future industry challenges. For over 16 years many of the world’s most successful companies throughout North America, the United Kingdom and the Asia Pacific region continue to choose ALI because its applications are proven to help businesses mitigate losses while delivering millions of dollars in bottom line benefit. For more information, visit www.ALIsolutions.com.

About China Merchants Bank
Founded on 8 April 1987, China Merchants Bank is the first share-holding commercial bank wholly owned by corporate legal entities. Headquartered in Shenzhen, the bank mainly focuses on the Chinese domestic market. China Merchants Bank has set up 47 branches, 648 sub-branches (including offices), one representative office in Beijing, one credit card center, one credit center for small-sized enterprises, 1,622 self-service banking centers and over 1,500 off-bank self-service machines (ATM & CDM) in Mainland China, and a wholly owned subsidiary CMB Financial Leasing Company Limited. China Merchants Bank owns two subsidiaries, namely, Wing Lung Bank Limited and CMB International Capital Corporation Limited, and a branch in Hong Kong. It has a branch and a representative office in New York, and a representative office in London.