News release
Contact:
Stephanie Dobson
Public Relations Manager, Business Information
+44 (0)115 992 2515 Tel
stephanie.dobson@uk.experian.com Email
Experian launches Risk Audit Plus to arm businesses with even more powerful credit risk insight
Nottingham, UK, 11 March 2009 - Experian®, the global information services company, today launched Risk Audit Plus. The new web-based risk management service provides organisations with an up-to-the-minute assessment of the credit risks and opportunities associated with their business customers.
With the UK economy in recession, Experian has developed Risk Audit Plus to help businesses address a number of the challenges they face in today’s economic climate. These include: understanding which businesses have the highest likelihood of failure, measuring the knock-on effect of potential bad debt and pinpointing when and whether a business is likely to pay its bills.
Risk Audit Plus quickly analyses and matches an organisation’s business customer records against Experian’s business universe of more than 5.1 million business records to automatically identify those customers most at risk and provide an instant credit risk portfolio assessment.
Experian’s data shows that 26% of business invoices were overdue for payment at the end of January 2009, compared to 20% at the end of January 2007. Large businesses are – on average - taking 47 days beyond agreed terms to settle their bills, which is double the average for UK businesses as a whole.
Against this backdrop, Risk Audit Plus equips organisations with the means to:
• Take the most appropriate customer risk management action using Experian’s Commercial Delphi risk assessment tool to highlight customers with a high risk profile.
• Improve cost management by identifying which businesses could be at risk of failure, enabling a business to project the impact failure could have on bad debt provisioning/losses.
• Improve cashflow management via Experian’s payment performance insight to identify how quickly customers are settling bills with other businesses. This information compares how they are paying the business relative to the terms set (Days Beyond Terms) and can be used to decide upon an appropriate course of action, such as altering the terms set.
Whilst mitigating their exposure to risk, Experian’s new service also provides businesses with the insight to identify new opportunities by:
• Maximising revenues and sales opportunities by identifying which businesses could have additional credit extended to them by comparing the Experian recommended credit limit with the credit limit the business has set. This can be used to illustrate how much more potential revenue could be generated by further extending credit to businesses within their customer base.
• Using Experian’s Mosaic Commercial segmentation system to improve customer insight by profiling the types of businesses being traded with and where potential opportunities/threats may exist.
• Matching customer records against Experian’s business database to eliminate data quality issues and improve collections and recovery efforts by ensuring businesses are contacted at the correct address.
Tony Pullen, Managing Director of Experian’s Business Information division, commented: “In today’s turbulent trading conditions, businesses need accurate data insight to help them deal with the challenges they are facing. Using Risk Audit Plus’s data and analytics insight means that businesses can now detect and anticipate changes in a customer’s financial behaviour that could prove to be critical in the future. In today’s climate, this is an incredibly powerful proposition and underlines our commitment to innovating in those areas where businesses need it most.”
For more information on Risk Audit Plus and to download a copy of Experian’s latest insolvency report visit www.experianbi.co.uk/riskauditplus