FICO® Debt Manager : Comprehensive Functionality for Debt ... · FICO® Debt anager™ Comprehensive Functionality for Debt Collection Recovery Collections and Recovery in Real Time

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March 2019 FICO® Debt Manager™ is a comprehensive debt collection and recovery platform designed to enable both large and small organizations to maximize returns, control costs and deliver strong customer engagement. It is configurable to a wide range of business requirements, including collections, recovery, debt sale, vendor management, bankruptcy, repossession and asset remarketing. Typical client industries include banking, government, auto lending, collections, retail, student loans, healthcare, telecom and utilities.

Debt Manager is ideal for organizations with multiple clients, products and risk portfolios; rapidly changing organizational hierarchies; and dynamic business models. The solution can scale to manage millions of accounts with thousands of concurrent users operating at single or multiple sites, yet it is flexible enough to be configured cost-effectively for mid-sized firms. Debt Manager is available in the cloud and on-premises.

This paper is intended to provide a functional overview of the distinguishing functionality that determines the applicability of Debt Manager as a solution for any operational business environment, infrastructure context and governance/compliance regime.

WHITE PAPERFICO® Debt Manager™: Comprehensive Functionality for Debt Collection & Recovery


Table of Contents Introduction ...........................................................................................................1

One System of Record for Collection and Recovery ...............................................3

Compliance Engineered Into the Platform ..............................................................5

GDPR Compliance .................................................................................................................. 5

Collections and Recovery in Real Time ..................................................................6

A Configurable Solution .........................................................................................7

Migration .................................................................................................................................. 8

User Interface Configuration ................................................................................................ 9

The Power of Decision Services ...........................................................................10

Intelligent Workflow .............................................................................................11

Integration ...........................................................................................................12

Batch Integration ..................................................................................................................12

Real-Time Integration ..........................................................................................................13

An Extensible Solution .........................................................................................14

Omni-Channel Communications .......................................................................................14

Analytics .................................................................................................................................14

Optimization ..........................................................................................................................14

Placements ............................................................................................................................15

Comprehensive Reporting....................................................................................16

Debt Manager Architecture ..................................................................................17

Scalability ...............................................................................................................................18

Transactions Versus Reporting .........................................................................................18

Clustering ...............................................................................................................................18

Large-Scale Concurrent Record Access .........................................................................19

Caching ................................................................................................................................... 19

Load-Balancing ..................................................................................................................... 19

Monitoring ..............................................................................................................................19

Client Data Separation .........................................................................................................19

Security ...............................................................................................................20

Secure Single Sign-On .........................................................................................................20

Authorization .........................................................................................................................20

Audit and Traceability ..........................................................................................................20

Encryption ..............................................................................................................................20

PA-DSS Compliance ............................................................................................................21

How to Get Started ...............................................................................................21



One System of

Record for Collection

and Recovery

FICO® Debt Manager™ is designed to operate as a single solution for the entire credit lifecycle, from pre-collection through collection, charge-off and recovery.

Debt Manager is used during the pre-collection and collection phases to manage case activity, collections workflow, contact management and communications. When working with a bank, it is generally integrated with the financial institution’s host system. Once an account is charged off from the host, the account becomes a different type of entity. Debt Manager can take over as the system of record, taking responsibility for charging interest, charging fees, splitting payments across accounts and other system of record functions.

Debt Manager serves as a true extension of the host system, continuing to manage accounts as if they were still on their host system, with extensive, specific processing options. The Debt Manager features used to process system of record accounts include:

• Prior period adjustments — Debt Manager automatically adjusts account and bucket balances when back-valued adjustments are applied, including recalculation of accrued interest.

• User-defined balances and financial “buckets” — Rather than dictate what sorts of funds should be associated with accounts, Debt Manager allows the client to define its own financial buckets. Examples include principal, interest, penalty fees, court costs, collection charges and so on. The client can create as many user-defined account balance types as needed, with each balance type consisting of one or more financial buckets.

• Shadow accounting — Through configuration, Debt Manager provides shadow accounting functionality. Financial buckets are defined specifically for shadow accounting requirements. Payments, adjustments (costs, attorney fees, title search fees, repo fees and more), NSFs and reversals are entered via financial batches. A background process will shadow these transactions to automatically post to the shadow balance.

• User-defined payment types — Debt Manager supports the tracking of unlimited payment types, including cash, check, mobile, online and PayPal. Payment memo codes denote the type of payment. Single and recurring payments are supported, as are postdated checks and electronically scheduled payments. The system supports multiple tender types (debit/credit/check) for payments, and processes recurring payments automatically upon maturity. Full, partial and late payments are supported, and the system can be configured to take appropriate action and initiate required workflow depending on the amount and timeliness of the payment. Late fees can be calculated and posted to the account.

• Interest processing — Debt Manager has multiple interest accrual and posting capabilities, including several alternatives for calculating interest. Options for accrual include simple, complex and compound.



• Payment application and apportionment — Debt Manager gives the client the ability to configure payment application rules to apportion payments across customer accounts and across the financial buckets within an account. Payments can be automatically apportioned across the buckets on an account based on a user-defined sequence, percentage, or a combination of both. The system maintains a record of a payment at multiple levels of customer, account and financial bucket.

• Reversal processing — To correct financial transactions posted in error, payment reversal and batch reversal files are processed within Debt Manager. Reversal transactions are tied directly to the original transactions. All components of the original transaction (e.g., interest, penalties, fees and principal) are reversed with a single entry across all accounts.

• Suspense payments — Transactions the system has received but failed to successfully apply are held in suspense for review. The user can correct an error such as an invalid account identifier and reapply the transaction, or refund an overpayment.

• Future balance calculations — Debt Manager will calculate a projected account balance at a specified future date, including current and future accrued interest and fees.

• Complex fee and commission structures — Schedules may be set up for fee calculation, including flat fees, percentage rates and tiered fees. These schedules model the contracts in place between the client and their collections business partners.

• Settlement processing — Settlement requests may be entered into the system as installment plans or as one-off payments, with the facility to route for manager authorization.

• Integration with payment processors — A configurable, generic payment processor interface allows connection with the payment processors for ACH and debit/credit card payments, for both scheduled and ad hoc payment arrangements.

• General ledger functionality — Debt Manager stores all financial transactions within internal general ledgers. The system records all journal entries into the general ledger via financial transactions for write-offs, aged debts, adjustments and uncollectable accounts. Debt Manager reports on journal entries and general ledger accounts, or data can be extracted to import into an external general ledger system.

The system of record functionality in FICO® Debt Manager™ provides many of the same capabilities of a banking host system of record.

Debt Manager is a global solution, with an installed base spanning over 30 countries. It has been implemented in more than 15 languages, including multibyte languages; it supports transactions in more than 40 currencies. Debt Manager can handle multiple currencies on the same instance of the software.



Compliance

Engineered Into

the Platform

FICO® Debt Manager™ is designed to be a global solution, and a critical part of that commitment is the system’s support for compliance with diverse regulatory standards. The platform provides a configurable compliance framework to ensure clients can implement rules in the system specific to their own situation, e.g., geography and legal jurisdiction, and manage rule changes quickly and easily on an ongoing basis as regulations change.

A recent example of a principal compliance issue concerns the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), designed to protect the privacy of EU residents. Privacy restrictions on data collection are expected to grow as a concern for collection and recovery operations worldwide. In the US, the State of California has passed similar privacy protections, which will take effect in 2020. New Jersey and Rhode Island are expected to adopt similar strict data privacy laws, and Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and Virginia have moved to define and protect personal information. All 50 states, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands now require notification of breaches affecting personal data. In addition, the US Commerce Department reportedly is exploring a federal approach to personal data protection.

GDPR Compliance

Under GDPR, EU “data subjects” have the right to know what personal data are being collected about them, the purpose for the collection and the recipients of the data. They have a right to access the data and correct it. If the data are corrected, the “controller” must notify all recipients of the data of the corrections.

Data subjects can object to certain processing of their data and have the right to receive and transmit to a third party personal data they voluntarily provide a controller. To a degree, data subjects also have the right to have the controller erase personal data about the data subject. These are just some of the requirements under the numbered articles of the GDPR that have direct impact on collections.

Debt Manager is engineered specifically to enable its users to be GDPR-compliant, article by article. For example:

• Right of access by the data subject — The Debt Manager user interface enables a collector to view a consumer’s personal details stored in the system, or generate a report containing a consumer’s personal data, run on demand for a specified consumer through the Debt Manager user interface. The collector can share the personal data with the data subject by either means.

• Right to rectification — The Debt Manager user interface enables the collector to modify a consumer’s personal details, and add details previously not recorded. Document Management System integration allows storage of supplementary media, including call recordings, customer correspondence, statements, legal documents and more provided by the consumer as images associated with the consumer record in Debt Manager. Or, statements provided by the consumer can be stored as notes on the consumer’s record.


Collections and

Recovery in

Real Time

• Right to erasure — Debt Manager can archive a consumer record and associated personal data, copying the consumer data from the live database to an archive database, and removing the data from the live database. Consumers in the archive database are stored for historical/audit purposes, and are available to view through the user interface, but are no longer subject to any processing. A stored procedure in Debt Manager will purge all data relating to a specified consumer identifier from the archive database.

• Notifications — Organizations that use the Debt Manager Consumer Portal to provide access to the system for consumers can include a visible privacy notice to communicate to the consumer the details regarding the use of personal data by the organization concerned. Debt Manager notices can include privacy statements whenever appropriate, or separate privacy notices can be configured and sent to consumers. The system can be configured to produce a notice addressed to the consumer across a number of channels, including email, SMS, printed mail and more, which the organization can schedule through the configurable workflow to be sent to the consumer at an appropriate point in the collections process.

FICO® Debt Manager™ constantly trades data with the organizations using it to collect and recover debt. Institutions typically manage collection data as a nightly batch process, because they run on mainframe systems. Debt Manager can operate in real-time mode, 24 x 7, with the ability to authorize payments in real time, via integration with a payment gateway to the worldwide transactions processing system. Debt Manager can authorize card transactions, bank wires and more without waiting for the nightly batch process to run to accomplish either an operational or financial goal.


Recently in Mississippi, consumer financial transactions were interrupted by a hurricane in August 2018. That meant that consumers who were behind on loan or credit card payments, who might normally be targeted by collection activity, were under extraordinary stress. It would not have been appropriate or productive to run collection programs on those accounts while they were coping with a natural disaster. In most collection or recovery systems, it is very tedious and time-consuming to suppress or postpone outbound communications under those circumstances, in real time. However, in FICO® Debt Manager™, it is easy to suppress calling on a group of people – e.g., in a geographic area where there is a state of emergency. In fact, it is conventional when the governor declares a state of emergency for that declaration to include an order to suspend debt collection for the duration of the emergency. For companies using Debt Manager, compliance is simple.



A Configurable

Solution

Even in batch mode, Debt Manager can enhance process efficiencies. Debt Manager can run multiple batch processes in parallel — concurrent rather than consecutive. If one large batch process is required, the client can break it up, and run 10 batches of 1 million accounts instead of one batch of 10 million. Meanwhile, Debt Manager keeps running, and collectors can go on working, while batch process updating is going on.

This is ideal for omni-channel environments. The call center has been the backbone of collection operations for decades. Call centers are not 24/7. They typically run 12-hour shifts, with predictive dialers in the big operations. Customer communication channels — the interactive voice response (IVR), the outbound dialers, the short message service (SMS) gateways — run 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. because that is when the collection system is up. With omni-channel platforms such as FICO® Customer Communication Services, because Debt Manager is 24/7, omni-channel communication is 24/7.

A collector might go home for the evening and come back to find that a customer has been triggered for a collection activity at 11:00 pm via email — the customer’s preferred channel and preferred time to receive messages. The customer may have had an interaction that hopped across three different channels. The outreach was email; the customer was linked to a web portal to set up an arrangement and opted for outbound voice reminders. That could all have happened between 11:00 p.m. and midnight, when the client chose to deal with it. The collector returns the following morning to find that the account is now reconciled — all because Debt Manager is capable of operating 24 x 7.

FICO® Debt Manager™ was designed for business requirements to be met via configuration, rather than requiring code customizations, through user-configurable data elements, work management functions and integration with the FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system. The capabilities of Debt Manager enable business users to configure their processes using the application GUI, minimizing reliance on IT resources and avoiding the need to wait for vendor-supplied product modifications or customizations.

Debt Manager comes with a preconfigured set of business processes encapsulating best practices accumulated from experience and expertise gained from years of business strategy, as well as operational and health check consulting in the collection and recovery industry. This configuration forms a baseline system that the client can easily adapt to its own business needs, saving significant time and costs in the implementation project.

Once configured, an instance of the application can be duplicated and used as a blueprint for separate instances in other locations, which can be further configured to account for regional or functional nuances.



Among the configurable elements are:

Workflow — Creating or changing business processes, work queues, tags, workflows and business rules is accomplished entirely within the application GUI.

User interface — Key field labels on the user interface can be edited. Context-sensitive custom views can be integrated into the standard Debt Manager GUI, to display data tailored to the organization’s needs, specific to the account being worked and the role of the user. Debt Manager allows the administrator to restructure the layout of the panels on the Agent Desktop.

Organization structure — The administrator can configure an organization structure to reflect the structure of the business, including multiple offices, each with its own hierarchical department structure, and work groups within each department. This enables the team to allocate work and apply differing business rules and processes at any level within your organization.

Product types — Each product type is configured with its base characteristics, including settlement rates, payment allocation, interest parameters and more. These characteristics can be changed at any time within the application GUI using the system setup pages. As product types change, any staff member with the appropriate privileges may reconfigure these characteristics without vendor or internal technical assistance. Product types can be grouped together into a hierarchical structure, which allows for more control over configuration of rules and processes.

User roles — System administrators can create fully configurable user roles that define the actions, screens, tools and segments of data to which a user has access. Debt Manager exposes more than 2,000 privileges that can be granted or denied to a user role, all of which are fully configurable.

User-defined data — Account and customer attributes not provided in the Debt Manager database schema can easily be added to the system by a business user. Debt Manager automatically makes these user-defined attributes available to the system’s business rules.

Migration

The Configuration Data Loader feature of Debt Manager allows users to easily promote full or partial configuration data changes from one Debt Manager environment to another. Via the system user interface, users select the entities they wish to extract from the “source” environment, and for each entity they may select a subset of data instances. They then create the export file, which contains their selected configuration data in a standard XML format. The user may then import the data into a “target” Debt Manager environment. The import process matches the incoming data with data already in the target system and inserts and modifies data as appropriate, while maintaining data consistency and referential integrity. Debt Manager keeps a full audit trail of both exports and imports.

Configurable Elements



The Configuration Data Loader safeguards your production environment by enabling users to make configuration changes in a development environment, test those changes and, when testing is signed off, promote the tested changes into their production environment, avoiding the need to edit the configuration data directly in production.

The control provided by Configuration Data Loader makes FICO® Debt Manager™ an excellent fit for organizations with deployment and release strategies based on continuous delivery or DevOps models.

Continuous Delivery is a software deployment and release methodology designed to increase agility from one end of the deployment process to the other. DevOps is a variation on this concept, focused on breaking down the dividing lines between development, QA and operations, so that the entire software lifecycle is run in a continuous and business aligned fashion. Many enterprises have adopted these schemes for their internal software development and release functions, and those firms will find Debt Manager fits comfortably into that picture.

User Interface Configuration

Recent releases of Debt Manager take advantage of browser-based UI design flexibility to bring together multiple data streams, applications and branding elements to provide highly customized experiences for users in the collections and recovery operation.

It is not unusual for a collector to have four to 12 applications on the desktop open at the same time: the host system, a calculator and some third-party data applications, as well as Debt Manager. The collector is constantly toggling in and out of the collection system. In the current version of Debt Manager, collectors have a UI that pulls all these resources together in one screen, taking advantage of open APIs, WebSphere, the extensible architecture, and HTML.

A new collector might not realize that they are sourcing nine different bits of information through nine different applications. They are simply trained on Debt Manager, and the other applications and data streams are available through a single UI, through widgets.

Each persona in the operation can have its own default UI, optimized to enhance the performance of the agent, collector or administrator.



The software is bundled with the FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system, providing many options for routing accounts. This gives clients operational agility, i.e., the ability to react to changing conditions, which is critical for increased collections.

Business rules and workflow management are fundamental to the Debt Manager architecture. Blaze Advisor enables business users to manage key components of the software decision-making mechanism, allowing the software’s behavior to be customized to meet changing business needs, minimizing organizational reliance on IT and enabling business functionality to be defined by business stakeholders.

Predictive models that run inside Debt Manager can be used for data segmentation, portfolio segmentation and other analytics-based decision support. These models, based on FICO’s extensive library of analytic models, can help the collections organization determine how best to treat accounts, predict whether payment will roll into the next cycle, project collectability rates and more.

FICO® Debt Manager™ workflow features include:

Rules Engine —The business can configure even the most complex decision logic via the Rules Engine, automating key business decisions, eliminating manual processes and speeding up processing with fewer human errors.

Auto-assignment — The system uses customer and account characteristics to distribute records to work groups, assuring customers and accounts are in the work queue that best ensures repayment, leading to increased collection rates.

Strategies —Strategies consist of a series of time-based and/or action-based decisions and actions to automate the workflows associated with customers and accounts over time. The system’s strategy functionality supports lifecycle management of customers and accounts.

Jobs — Jobs within Debt Manager apply standardized actions to a group of customers or accounts, and are defined using filter criteria, instead of applying actions one at a time. Actions include reassignment of work, sending of letters, modifying interest rates, forwarding accounts to third parties, setting statuses, calling rules and more.

Tags — Used to represent not only status, but also the stages of a process that records have been through; tags can be used for approval processes, to mark customers and accounts with alerts, and much more.

The software provides access to thousands of data points. Through a graphical user interface, the user can define the criteria evaluations for the decisions, so all available data points are presented as options for inclusion within each rule.

The system can react to events that occur in the system in real time, taking action based on the work being done within the collections operation, without human intervention. Both user actions and system actions can trigger changes in data and downstream actions to be taken in real time. Examples of actions are sending a letter, initiating an authorization process, sending a message to a manager, setting a status (tag) and changing the strategy being applied to a customer or account.

The Power of

Decision Services

Workflow



FICO® Debt Manager™ comes with a standard workflow engine, used to implement flexible workflows via configuration without burdening IT programming resources.

Configurable workflow functionality and automation tools typically are used in collections and recovery to provide efficient electronic routing of account or customer records through each stage of the process, with human intervention only where the business requires it. Workflow features and tools enhance the agility of the team as well as its capacity to respond to changing business demands and realign strategies with business and operational goals. Debt Manager workflows can drive an account-centric or customer-centric business process, depending on the organization’s choices and priorities. By linking account and customer records appropriately, one workflow can be applied to groups of accounts or customers. This is just one example of the way flexible workflow management enables the organization to enhance operations.

Workflows, and events within workflows, can be triggered in several different ways. Examples:

Real-time & event-based workflow — Imagine a car loan customer with a long history of non-payment, which has progressed to the point of triggering repossession of the car. Now imagine the customer makes an overdue payment. Once that payment is recorded, the lender, seeking to keep the account on the books and guide the customer toward a productive pattern of payment, would like to immediately stop the automated process that results in repossession of the car. With Debt Manager’s workflow controls, the system calls out to the repossession vendor to update the case and stop repossession. This is one example of the many real-time, event-based triggers for workflow.

Timeline — An entire treatment can be defined for a given consumer segment over time. For example, as soon as an account comes into collections, the client configures Debt Manager to send out a friendly collections email to the consumer’s preferred email account, and then wait five days. If after five days there is no response, workflow is configured to follow up with an SMS. If after three days there is no response to the SMS, Debt Manager triggers a call from the call center using a predictive dialer. Time-based workflow can choreograph this entire process.

Jobs — Scheduled events (jobs) can be configured within the software to manage the account in various ways at scheduled intervals.

Within each of these workflow types, there are rules generated and managed by the FICO® Blaze Advisor® decision rules management system embedded in Debt Manager.

Intelligent Workflow

Triggers



FICO® Debt Manager™ is an open platform, which can be integrated easily with account management, payments processing, analytics and other legacy systems of financial institutions, as well as predictive dialers, payment processors and more. Access to data is continuous and real-time. Clients adopting the Debt Manager platform do not have to abandon existing systems. Rather, clients may continue to use products in which their organization has already invested or adopt new products to meet their own unique needs.

Debt Manager has been developed to be highly interoperable with a wide variety of platforms using web services. Key features of the application have been published as web services integration points. These integration points enable Debt Manager to participate in higher-level business processes within an organization.

Debt Manager provides a set of RESTful web services, exposing hundreds of APIs as platform-independent means of system-to-system interaction. These web services support JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). All services make use of the HTTPS protocol for transport. APIs are provided for performing a large variety of operations on all the major customer- and account-based entities in Debt Manager. The REST API Reference Guide, supplied with the Debt Manager documentation, provides a comprehensive library of functions with which to integrate.

Debt Manager supports both batch and real-time integration, a choice generally based on the limitations in the technology to which the system is being connected and the practical windows of time in which data exchanges can take place.

Integration


Batch Integration

Debt Manager provides a standard, XML-based, import/export interface known as the Bulk Data Loader. Clients may use the FICO-recommended Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool, or an ETL tool of their choice, to convert the external systems’ data to and from the Debt Manager standard XML format. FICO’s tool uses XML as its primary means of data transport, import and extract, although data may be converted to virtually any file type using this ETL tool, which is especially useful when dealing with many external systems.

The Bulk Data Loader can be used to import updates to account and customer data. Import files are registered on receipt and validated, and valid data is loaded into the main Debt Manager database. Standard XML file formats are provided for all supported entities. Financial Transactions are imported using a standard Payment Import feature, which validates each transaction in a batch and apportions payments across accounts and financial buckets.

The system UI enables definition of Export Templates to determine the entities and sub-entities to be included in the export file, and which customers or accounts to include. The Bulk Data Loader also allows filtering, in the export file, of customers or accounts that have been updated within a specified time period. Financial transactions are exported using the Bulk Financial Transactions Export tool. The system UI allows creation of a filter to identify financial transactions for export. A standard XML file format is used for export files.

Real-Time Integration

Debt Manager exposes a rich set of RESTful web services as platform-independent means of system-to-system interaction. These services can be orchestrated and called in many different ways, at various levels of granularity. Debt Manager exposes hundreds of APIs for integration with a variety of external systems, including, for example, a configurable outbound API invocation for payment processors to process payments in real time.

These integration tools give the client the ability to establish its own interfaces. Integrations are quick and require minimal investment of time and resources. For example, via these integrations, any customer data can be easily brought into Debt Manager from a CRM system for scoring purposes.




Debt Manager’s out-of-the-box functionality provides a uniquely comprehensive and powerful solution for the entire range of accounts receivable, collections and recovery operations. FICO enhances the value of the platform through integration with its full portfolio of technologies for collection and recovery operations.

Omni-Channel Communications

Workflow within FICO® Debt Manager™ segments accounts and determines what type of handling will result in the highest rate of payment. A high-value customer with a mortgage, who has been a good payer but recently had a job loss, merits a different treatment versus an account that quickly went delinquent and with whom an institution has little history. A critically important element of that treatment is the contact plan — method for communicating with each account, which analytics can help to optimize to secure the best possible rate of payment. That decisioning is implemented in Debt Manager and then operationalized through integration with FICO® Customer Communication Services.

Customer Communication Services delivers email, voice, text and mobile app notifications orchestrated to effectively communicate with customers throughout the credit lifecycle. It manages communications based on the contact preferences of the account. Debt Manager passes this information to Customer Communication Services, which handles the two-way communications with the account. In addition, Debt Manager has models for portfolio segmentation.

FICO Customer Communication Services is delivered as an optional component of a Debt Manager implementation.

Analytics

Analytics determine what characteristics of the customer or account are predictive, and incorporate the data into models that enable the collection organization to configure their thresholds. For example, they might expand the balance range for accounts that are eligible for a certain treatment through configuration in Debt Manager. Responses are fed back into Debt Manager.

Out of the box, Debt Manager includes several machine learning models for prediction of payments, whether or not payment will roll into the next billing cycle, collectability and more. These predictions are used within the model of segmented accounts.

Optimization

Debt Manager provides onboard decision management and workflow capabilities that enhance the effectiveness of collection and recovery operations. The next step beyond enhancement is optimization — the use of advanced analytics, including machine learning and artificial intelligence models, to determine the ideal action to take on each account, within operational and budget constraints. How many collectors? What treatment/strategy? What is the right vendor for this account?

An Extensible Solution



Optimization is not native Debt Manager functionality, but it is a core capability of FICO, one of the world’s leaders in next generation analytics. FICO’s tools and expertise make financial services, telecommunications, and credit/collections service providers more competitive by enabling them to individualize pricing and credit offers for customers. Optimization lets providers manage risk while tailoring the most attractive terms to each customer. Its analytics generate individualized strategies for collection and recovery, as well as agency placement.

Optimization is prescriptive; we are finding the best action to take with every account, given the business constraints — call-center staffing, budget and more. The model can optimize the number of collectors, the treatments for account segments, placement of accounts in recovery, identifying collectors with the right skills for specific types of accounts or accounts at different stages, or even the correct strategy to apply for an individual account.

FICO’s optimization tools and services can be incorporated as an option with a Debt Manager implementation.

Placements

Placement of accounts with external collection agencies is a function that is most directly relevant to accounts in recovery, but the capability can be useful in collections as well. Some organizations that have adopted Debt Manager have large call centers that do both collection and recovery; others have call centers only for collection and outsource all recovery operations. Some have specialist teams to deal with accounts that have gone delinquent because of an illness affecting the borrower, or some other special case involving high-touch handling.

FICO® PlacementsPlus® service is a cloud-based solution to manage the placement process. Debt Manager incorporates placements functionality natively; clients have achieved significantly greater value by integrating Debt Manager with the PlacementsPlus service.

In addition to PlacementsPlus service, FICO offers Placement Optimizersm solution, which leverages custom analytics to identify the collections agency or channel most likely to maximize payment. Using optimized account placement strategies, creditors typically see 3% to 11% increases in recoveries compared to traditional approaches. Creditors maintain complete control of placement strategies by defining business constraints, and by making strategy modifications as needed.



FICO® Debt Manager™ provides more than 80 standard reports to compare the collections rates and work efforts of the different agencies and attorneys working accounts. These standard reports provide information on metrics, operations, statuses, future revenue expectations and many other important productivity benchmarks. You may copy and modify existing reports to serve as report templates, as well as create and/or upload as many custom reports as needed.

The platform uses Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). Standard reports provide information on metrics, operations, statuses, future revenue expectations and many other important productivity benchmarks. There are also operational dashboards within Debt Manager — live streaming dashboards to show all the work activity, activity across different locations for distributed call-center operations, dialing activity, profitability stating changes as payments come in and more.

Reporting services are built on top of FICO® Decision Management Platform Streaming, in cloud or on-premises, that enables the client to import, normalize and synthesize data from diverse sources to quickly analyze the best data to generate decisions. Debt Manager can use DMP streaming to reach out to other systems for operational monitoring.

Standard FICO® Debt Manager™ Report Set

Comprehensive

Reporting

IntroductionIntellectual Property Statement

Pre-Defined Debt Manager Reporting Samples*Note: You must enable macros to use this document .

Account Reports Creditor Reports Dashboards Invoice Reports Payment ReportsAccount Master List Creditor Analysis Agent Collection Effort AR Proof Report Consumer Bucket ReportAccount Status Report Creditor Fees Report Collector Payments Credit Card Report Expected IncomeAccount Tag Summary Creditor Inventory by Workgroup Creditor Aged Balances Fixed Fees ReportAR Analysis Event Report Creditor Ranking Report Data Integrity Analysis Creditor Aged Balances by Month Payment Batch ListCase Account List Report History Analysis Available Data Integrity Creditor Cash Journal Payment ListCase List Report Monthly Spindown Report Contact Data Integrity Creditor Checks Report Payment List by WorkgroupCollection Activity Report Paid in Full by Creditor Print Invoice Report Recovery and LiquidationConsumer Address List Status of Accounts by Creditor Diagnostic Reports Receiver Invoice Workgroup Payments and Commissions by CreditorConsumer Fact Sheet Currently Running Queries Receiver Payables StatementConsumer Master List Daily Reports Diagnostic Dashboard Report Receiver Receivables Statement Receiver ReportsConsumer Tag Summary Report Accounts to Come off Hold Dialer Log Creditor Unpaid Balance Report Receiver Placements/Payments Roll-UpPostal Code Analysis Acknowledgement Letter Debt Manager API Call History Tax Filing Receiver By QuarterStudent Loan Increases Cash Journal Report Invalid Login Attempts Receiver CumulativeTag History Report Consumers to Come off Hold Long Running Queries Organization Reports Receiver Current Month

Credited User Totals Multiple User Logins Agent Commission Report Receiver ReportsAAM Reports Credited User Totals by Consumer Workgroup PAN Access Agent Work Efforts Receiver SpindownService Requests Report Summary Creditor Cash Journal Agent Work Efforts by Work QueueService Requests Report Detail Creditor Return Letter Collection Summary Report System Reports

List of Pending Payments Current Analysis Report Action CodesContact Reports Rollover Status Reports Locked Out Users Creditor ListCollector Activity New Business Batch Status Report New Business Analysis Organization Configuration ItemsConsumer Last Contact Unreleased New Business Batch Status Report Status of Accounts by Workgroup Result CodesContact Attempts Tags by Tag Type UsersNotice Sent List Work in Process ReportNotices by Status Workgroup Analysis

Workgroup New Business AnalysisWorkgroups by Office



FICO® Debt Manager™ is an N-tier web-based application residing within a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) consisting of the client, web application server, and database server.

Client Tier

A web browser is used to access Debt Manager. The Java Web Start technology offers easy access to the latest versions of applications for the end user, easy management and deployment of applications for internal IT departments, and easy development for the FICO user interface (UI) software developers.

The Debt Manager client is built on the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) in Java, the software component framework delivering native widget functionality for the Eclipse platform in an operating system independent manner. In addition to the Java Web Start user interface, Debt Manager comes with a thin client, browser-based user interface known as FitAgent™, which is specifically built for the collections agent.

Service Integration Tier

The service integration tier establishes a common point of integration within application tiers and across application boundaries. It acts as the service provider, exposing a public interface through which the system can be invoked by service requestors. Services that are exposed to and consumed by the Java Web Start client are defined as HTTP/HTTPS services passing serialized objects using Java’s binary serialization. Public services exposed to external systems are defined as RESTful Web Services.

Business Tier

Most application logic is written in the business tier, taking advantage of many application server-provided services, including transactions, security, connection pooling, messaging and name services. Business logic in the business tier includes:

• Performing required calculations and validations

• Managing workflow, including the tracking of session data

• Defining and exposing an API for application business services performed within the system

• Aggregating behavior to provide a uniform service layer

• Encapsulating cohesive behavior specific to a set of related business operations

Debt Manager is integrated with FICO® Blaze Advisor®, the world’s leading decision rules management system.

Data Access Tier

The application accesses an online transaction processing (OLTP) database via Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) thin connection, several external RESTful web services using HTTP/HTTPS, shared file system and directory server. This tier provides transparent persistence for business objects, as well as abstracting and encapsulating access to persistent stores of data and external systems. Transparent persistence is simply the ability to directly manipulate the stored data in a relational database via a programming language.

Debt Manager

Architecture



Enterprise Systems Tier

The enterprise systems tier displays the external systems that Debt Manager accesses and integrates. The OLTP database serves as the system of record for all data stored and tracked by the application.

Debt Manager is N-tier architectured, which gives developers the ability to enhance/update the system by modifying a specific tier, instead of modifying the code for the entire software application.

Scalability

Debt Manager is designed for very high-volume transactional processing. The software architecture is able to elegantly handle growing volumes in a horizontally scalable manner, and individual software nodes within the deployment are tuned for optimal performance. Debt Manager has been proven to support more than 10,000 concurrent users under heavy load while maintaining sub-second response times.

The database ships with approximately 20,000 columns across 1,300 tables, and customer datasets scale into many terabytes of storage comprising billions of records of online active data.

Transactions Versus Reporting

Debt Manager separates online transactional use from reporting and analytics use, isolating the reporting functions onto a separate dedicated reporting server in order to ensure that the OLTP system for transactional processing can continue to function in the high-performance mode for which it was originally designed. This deployment model results in business stakeholders being able to generate analysis and operational reports using up-to-the-second data without having any impact on the online users generating large volumes of sub-second transactions.

Clustering

Debt Manager operates within a distributed and clustered environment, running as a group of servers working together as one logical entity to ensure minimal downtime and maximum scalability. It can handle more capacity (more users, more data, or both) by adding additional nodes to the application server cluster, as well as by adding additional resources (memory, CPUs and more) to individual servers. Scaling horizontally avoids having to make large upfront commitments to expensive high-end servers. Instead, organizations can incrementally add smaller commodity hardware to expand overall throughput and processing power.



Large-Scale Concurrent Record Access

Debt Manager leverages optimistic locking throughout its data access layer to manage concurrent record access. The software assumes multiple transactions can complete without affecting each other, and therefore transactions can proceed without locking the data resources that they affect. Before committing, each transaction verifies that no other transaction has modified its data. If the check reveals conflicting modifications, the committing transaction rolls back. This strategy provides for a better user experience and can scale to high volumes since no locking of records or persistent connections to the database server are required.

Caching

Debt Manager employs several sophisticated caching mechanisms in order to more quickly serve frequently or repeatedly accessed sets of data. Reference data, organization data, user data and other data that are seldom modified are cached within JVM-level in-memory cache instances using a least recently used (LRU) eviction algorithm and a time-based expiration strategy. In addition to process-level caching, Debt Manager uses transaction-level caching, especially useful for mid-tier services that engage the rules engine. The software also implements several application caches that anticipate the needs of a user based on the work that the user is performing. Debt Manager will read ahead and store anticipated work items in a temporary cache for fast retrieval.

Load-Balancing

Debt Manager uses Microsoft SQL Server as its database. SQL Server does not support load balancing, but provides the “Always On” feature that uses an Active/Passive setup to provide failover clustering.

Monitoring

FICO administers regular health checks using Zabbix, an open source network monitoring tool to monitor servers, virtual machines and cloud services, tracking network utilization, CPU load, disk space consumption and other metrics.

Client Data Separation

Debt Manager uses a “same database, separate schemas” methodology. In Microsoft SQL Server, this methodology is implemented by having multiple databases on a single database server instance (a “database” in SQL Server is equivalent to a “schema”). The data files for each of the databases are kept on a separate disk to ensure data separation.

To maintain isolation of in-memory data, Debt Manager processes for each customer are run in dedicated instances, ensuring the in-memory data is separated. The system requires dedicated instances for each customer to ensure isolation by customer, and requires dedicated instances for each customer to ensure log file isolation by customer.



FICO® Debt Manager’s™ commitment to security includes pluggable authentication, encryption at rest, data-in-transit encryption and multiple roles for users.

Secure Single Sign-On

Debt Manager takes advantage of the client organization’s identity provider, regardless of whether it is operating in the cloud or on premises. The system includes out-of-the-box integrations for Ping, OKTA, Oracle Identity Manager and other common identity providers.

Authorization

The Debt Manager authorization model is based on roles and privileges. Privileges are mapped to service APIs invoked by the application client. Roles are collections of privileges and are assigned to users.

Audit and Traceability

Debt Manager tracks user and account records, at the request level and at the data instance level, to provide robust auditing and traceability throughout the entire system. All account interactions are saved. Changes are logged in shadow tables, historical events and database logs. The system tracks all revisions as well as the complete history of the changed data over time. Clients never have to worry about backtracking to find out who did what, where or when.

For every record that is viewed, there is a log entry. Being able to trace every view of data is essential for many clients, especially healthcare firms that are regulated by HIPAA. For any data created or updated, in any of the 1,500 tables in the database, Debt Manager includes the six audit fields: who created the record, the time stamp when it was created, the person who made the change, the time stamp of the change, a sequential transaction number, and the software module through which the change was made. The former record is copied to a shadow table. Thus, there is full traceability for every piece of information.

Encryption

Network communications between the Debt Manager end user and application server are encrypted at the transport layer using TLS 1.2. The communication is accomplished using HTTPS. In Debt Manager, passwords are stored using one-way hash. They are masked when displayed and they are never logged.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is protected by three levels of encryption: Data in transit, data at rest and field level. Specific data elements deemed extremely sensitive (e.g., personal identifiers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers and sensitive user-defined fields) are encrypted at the field level using AES 256-bit encryption.

Security


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FICO, Debt Manager, Blaze Advisor, FitAgent, PlacementsPlus, and Placement Optimizer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation in the United States and in other countries. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. © 2019 Fair Isaac Corporation. All rights reserved. 4690WP_EN 03/19 PDF

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PA-DSS Compliance

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) governs the ongoing development, management, education and awareness of standards that are designed to protect payment card information and to prevent cardholder fraud. The Council administers a framework of specifications, tools, measurements and support resources to help organizations ensure the safe handling of cardholder information. Debt Manager is fully compliant with these specifications.

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a mandatory requirement for an organization that stores, processes or transmits account data operationally. The Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) incorporates a set of requirements derived from PCI DSS. Debt Manager is compliant with PA-DSS principles in its processing, storage and transmission of cardholder data. The system does not permanently store sensitive card information, such as card track data, card verification number or PIN code; Debt Manager never uses this information.

Although an application can retain payment card numbers (PCNs) it must encrypt the data and store it in a secure manner to prevent compromise by an unauthorized third party. Debt Manager meets all aspects of the relevant PA-DSS standards. FICO obtains certification for it every year.

Debt Manager employs the following security protocols:

• Client-to-server network communication uses a TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol in conjunction with HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure).

• Portal-to-server network communication uses a TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol in conjunction with HTTPS.

• Server-to-application database communication uses a proprietary SQLServer protocol.

• Server-to-external payment processor communication uses a TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol in conjunction with HTTPS.

FICO® Debt Manager™ is the broadest, most capable platform for collection and recovery, with a large and stable installed base worldwide.

To learn more about FICO Debt Manager, contact a sales representative using the contact information below or

visit www.fico.com/debtmanager.

Documents

FICO® Debt Manager : Comprehensive Functionality for Debt ... · FICO® Debt anager™ Comprehensive Functionality for Debt Collection Recovery Collections and Recovery in Real Time