eCredit nFusion cuts the cost of credit for XTRA Lease.(credit software)(Advertisement)

XTRA Lease, a St. Louis-based leader in trailer rental and leasing, needed to ensure its competitive edge by providing the best customer service possible, and that meant making credit decisions as quickly as possible.

"We needed to better serve customers that wanted to rent our trailers immediately," says John Pomilio, Vice President, Customer Financial Services, at XTRA Lease. "Two-thirds of our business is immediate; the other third is long-term. Customers have freight they need to move right away, and we can't afford to wait one extra minute for a credit approval decision." After a period of due diligence, Pomilio selected nFusion[R], the latest suite of Web-based credit applications from Dedham, Mass.-based eCredit.

Although eCredit has offered industry-leading credit management products since 1993, nFusion is a first in that it consolidates all of the functionality from the company's earlier solutions under a single, powerful, web-based umbrella. nFusion automates credit and collections decision-making practices to deliver process efficiencies, improve cash flow, optimize risk management, and increase revenues.

"nFusion allows us to approach instantaneous response levels regarding customer risk potential," says Pomilio. "It also adheres to much more consistent decision standards than a human-driven, manual process. It looks at every customer the same way and with the same set of criteria which we were able to define based on our own credit policies."

XTRA Lease went live with its nFusion implementation in October 2003 to automate decision support, credit scoring and management of its 15,000 customer portfolio. Every customer's credit facility is reviewed at least once a year, and nFusion takes a nightly read of customer credit limits expiring in the next 30 days to processes those customers through scoring models and update their credit limits. Also facilitating smoother portfolio management for XTRA Lease's decentralized credit department is the fact that credit details are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; in this system, managers need only a laptop and a connection to the web to access customer data. Using an eCredit XML-based application programming interface to integrate directly into the XTRA Lease branch network, transaction processing time for credit requests received directly from a branch have been reduced to less than one minute. "We're already receiving feedback from the field about how fast the new solution is," says Pomilio. XTRA Lease began its credit scoring initiatives seven years ago, with software that Pomilio says was state of the art at the time. "At best, we could score an account and get a response in 15 minutes," he says. "But that speed was predicated on the use of credit data that we had to purchase from our data provider, and it's still not nearly as fast as nFusion."

Pomilio's team forecasted three years past ...