Zoot Announces Advancements in Instant Prescreen Lending

New Capabilities Expand Consumer Credit Reach, Produce Higher Acceptance Rates for Lenders

BOZEMAN, Mont.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Zoot, a leading provider of advanced instant credit decisioning and loan origination solutions, announced the release of zAcquire℠ instant prescreen decisioning solution with Prescreen 3.0 capabilities. Prescreen 3.0 integrates new types of data into the instant prescreen process and provides a more comprehensive evaluation of consumers.

Additional data, when employed in a prescreen environment provides more accurate, predictive and cost effective credit decisions. Lenders are able to grant credit to a greater number of consumers, without changing their risk tolerance, and gain insight regarding the most appropriate credit product to offer. Supplementing traditional credit bureau data with more complete consumer information helps lenders lower their screening costs by ruling out certain credit applicants sooner in the process.

Zoot pioneered the prescreen process in 1992 by helping its clients create the first instant prescreen (or prescreen-of-one) solution in the country. Subsequently, Zoot became the first multi-bureau provider of prescreen-of-one solutions. While these changes revolutionized the industry, the unique issues facing today’s financial market have established the need for the next generation of prescreen capabilities, which the company defines as Prescreen 3.0.

Zoot has partnered with several alternative credit data sources to provide lenders with information that broadens the use and appeal of instant prescreen. More complete background data allows creditors to decision thin file and no file consumers that were not able to be scored previously. As quoted in the July 13, 2010 issue of American Banker Tom Johnson, vice president of product development at Zoot says, "We find that right now in the market there is a hunger for other data and additional intelligence.”

“By allowing our clients to seamlessly integrate new types of data into the instant prescreen process, lenders now have more flexibility to comply with new regulations, improve credit risk evaluation and enhance the customer experience. The addition of alternative credit data strengthens the underwriting process in addition to helping segment customers for marketing campaigns,” said Johnson.

Augmenting traditional credit bureau data can bring significant lift to lenders. Recent testing of consumer data has shown a 60 percent lift for consumer reports considered thin files and a 15 percent lift for full file consumers. These tests also found that the majority of consumers that are returned as a “no hit” can be scored based on demographic data not available in a traditional credit bureau file (i.e. professional licenses, asset information, education, utility records, rent payments, fraud data, address changes, collections data, pay day lending, lien information, etc.).

Zoot’s clients benefit from the ability to control their entire prescreen environment—implementing greater intelligence, logic changes, offer optimization, profitability scoring, and cross-sell—in addition to the redundancy provided by Zoot’s infrastructure. This flexibility and reliability allows them to adapt quickly in response to the market and never miss an opportunity to sell a credit product.

About Zoot

Bozeman, Mont.-based Zoot provides comprehensive credit decisioning, loan origination and credit risk management solutions to enable clients’ unique business objectives, leading to long-term relationships with top U.S. banks. Zoot’s rapid, high-volume processing environment has the capacity to process billions of transactions per year. Visit http://www.zootweb.com or call 406-556-7555 for more information.

Editor’s Note

Prescreen-of-one (or instant prescreen) is a process that allows banks to assess a consumer’s creditworthiness from credit report data in certain limited circumstances without the consumer’s advance consent. Zoot, acting as agent to a number of established bureaus, allows the company to facilitate prescreen processing. Under FCRA rules, banks are not permitted in a prescreen transaction to actually see a consumers’ credit data or file in the decisioning process, and for any consumer passing the prescreen filter, the bank must make a “firm offer of credit”.

CONTACT:

For Zoot Enterprises
Karen Gordon, 406-556-8977

KEYWORDS:   United States  North America  Montana

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