New Name Caps Fresh Start for Fairbanks.(Select Portfolio Servicing)

Capping a year-long shakeup to address allegations of improper collection practices, Fairbanks Capital Corp. has chosen a new name: Select Portfolio Servicing.

The name change may be appropriate, because just about everything else about Fairbanks has changed over the past 12 months. The company is under the direction of an entirely new management team. And the company claims it now provides leading-edge customer service practices.

In the past 12 months, the company said it has implemented leading practices that are setting a standard in the industry for customer responsiveness while helping to responsibly manage the risk of the nonprime residential loan market.

And Select Portfolio Servicing CEO James Ozanne told MSN that the name is intended to reflect the company's renewed commitment to servicing quality. He acknowledged that the search for a new name had its frustrations because of the need to find a name that could be licensed in all 50 states.

He says that while the process improvements and controls added by Fairbanks before the name change have added to the cost of customer service in some regards, they have also created the potential to reduce costs over the long run. He compares it to enhancing procedures at a factory to reduce the scrap rate.

"Operationally, we have cha-nged a whole series of practices, some of which have helped us reduce delinquencies," he said.

And any move that eliminates errors in the servicing process saves costs in the long run, he said.