The sun may set on BankAmerica Corp.'s credit card center in Phoenix, but its doors never close.
The five-building complex operates around-the-clock in a campus-like setting near the Phoenix airport. It fields 750,000 customer calls a month, receives 5,000 to 10,000 account applications a day, and processes as many as 250,000 payments daily.
Outside the buildings, each named for a local mountain, employees in casual dress enjoy lunch hours in the desert warmth. Inside, they input data, make collection calls, airbrush customer identification photos, and answer endless cardholder questions.
"Around 95% of applications are processed the day they arrive," said David Wood, who runs the new-accounts area. "We get them electronically from California branches, we get some by paper, fax-you name it."
Scanning equipment has cut in half the amount of application information that must be typed by hand, Mr. Wood said. Computers then check eight data bases to weed out fraudulent applications. The machines can render a decision on most applications in 20 seconds. Others are sent to human credit analysts.
On the wall in Mr. Wood's department is a rogues' gallery of novel deception attempts: people who have tried to pass themselves off as Paul McCartney, Bill Gates, or a supermodel. For some reason, Belmont Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y., is the address that generates the most fraudulent applications.
"Some people just feel they can get away with it," Mr. Wood said. "Some places don't bother to check."
Bank of America began offering customers the option of having their photos on their cards three years ago, and officials say the practice reduced fraud and increased customer loyalty.
"We make sure they like their picture so they'll use the card," Mr. Wood said.
In the photocard area, technicians use software to enhance the pictures and signatures to be burned into the plastic. A weak signature may be thickened to make it look like it was signed in felt-tipped pen. Over a million photocards have been issued, and 25,000 to 30,000 more go out each month.
Legitimate applications move from the photo shop to the campus' processing center, which creates 13.5 million cards a year (60% credit cards, 40% for automated teller machines). About 13 million blank cards are kept in a vault and 11 machines whir 20 hours a day embossing cards, stuffing them in envelopes, and stamping them.
Remittance processing is another function technology has made easier. Debbie Hudson, the supervisor, remembers five years ago when workers had to remove payments from envelopes by hand and key them into a computer. Then the department got what Ms. Hudson calls "the Flintstones machine," which extracted payments at low speed. Today she has a machine that separates payments from envelopes and records the checks in the blink of an eye.
Customers with billing questions and other inquiries get routed to the call center in the campus' newest building, which is only half-occupied in anticipation of further growth. The bank strives to have each call answered within 30 seconds, and usually at least 80% of them are.
Collections and fraud control are in the same building. The collections department is divided by degree of delinquency: One group begins calling cardholders as early as four days after a payment has been missed; accounts in the "60-day" unit get assigned to specific workers and things become "a little more intense" in the 90-day past-due area, said supervisor Teri Orr.
By contrast, cardholders are generally pleased when contacted by the anti-fraud unit. It gets about 135,000 calls a month, mostly from people who say their cards have been lost or stolen or from merchants reporting something suspicious.
