Asian Finance Company Launches CAMS II for Unique Lending Requirements

Responding to Market Changes

A leading provider of consumer credit and financing services in Asia found itself facing new and daunting challenges, including deregulation of the financial services industry, new lending technologies and a diversifying client base with more sophisticated demands. To meet those challenges, the company worked with CSC to explore ways to improve their financial systems. In October 2005, the company launched a customized version of CAMS II™ Card & Merchant System. The system has enabled the company to introduce more flexible product offerings, better serve consumers and merchants, and improve data management.

The consumer finance company decided to explore new information technology (IT) solutions as a way to maintain its market share while pursuing new customers and opportunities. The company wanted an ally to implement a lending solution, as well as integrate other IT solutions as needed to support its customer relationship management (CRM) business model. It selected CSC's CAMS II solution, which supports multiple card types and lending instruments, including debit cards, credit cards, smart cards and consumer installment loans.

"Our original goals were to introduce a system allowing us to easily enable business structural transformation in the future and to alleviate administrative workload," said a key executive with the company.

Understanding Client Needs

CSC and the company began by defining the company’s business requirements. Cards management for Japan differs from U.S. and European implementation. The company’s system had to integrate contract lending support with card management functionality, for instance. In Japan, when a customer makes a purchase with a debit or credit card, they select how many months over which to spread the payments. The system also had to address numerous options for the payment terms, which affected how finance charges and payment amounts were calculated. The finance company also often shared risk with other financial institutions, so CAMS II would need to manage those relationships as well.

At the same time, the company’s client base was shifting away from smaller retailers to larger mega-store chains, which would be more demanding and expect better customer service and more flexibility in pricing, funds settlement and data processing. The company was also adding customers from new channels, such as automobile dealers and agriculture and livestock industries.

Successful Cutover

To address these challenges, the Asian company worked closely with CSC staff in Tokyo, Japan; Dallas, Texas; Melbourne, Australia; and Noida, India to customize, develop and implement a customized CAMS II system. Full conversion from the legacy cards management system to CAMS II was completed October 2005. The conversion included more than half a million loans, 2 million cards, almost 80,000 merchants and nearly 6 million credit lines.

CSC's solution provides the finance company with issuing, acquiring and lending functions — all integrated under one custom version of CAMS II — with screens in both English and Kanji. Procedures that were once labor intensive have been automated, including online, real-time processing. CAMS II along with the IBM DB2 universal database architecture support workflow management that replaced the company’s spreadsheet-driven processes.

With CAMS II, the company is able to respond to the market much more quickly and introduce new products, such as promotional pricing for a certain period of time, which the previous system was unable to do. Furthermore, with its extensible architecture CAMS II can support the company’s future strategic initiatives as they evolve to meet market needs.

“We chose CAMS II to help us gain new markets and business partners,” said the company executive. “With the launch started, we’re seeing those benefits starting to happen.”

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