Fifth Third Bancorp is using a new account-opening system from eFunds Corp., a Scottsdale, Ariz., vendor of electronic payments and risk management software, to measure the risk that a potential customer will overdraw an account.
Patrick Ziller, the $104.6 billion-asset Cincinnati banking company’s senior vice president of retail operations, said it upgraded from eFunds’ ChexSystems account-opening system to its QualiFile system last month.
The QualiFile system uses data stored in eFunds’ DebitBureau database to analyze a prospective customer’s risk of overdrawing an account, Mr. Ziller said in an interview Monday.
Fifth Third conducted a two-week pilot test of the system at about 20 sites last month, and then rolled it out to all its 1,100 full-service branches in nine states, “with the thought of opening more accounts and declining fewer accounts,” he said.
Initial feedback from the bankers has been good, Mr. Ziller said, and account openings are growing “at our expectation.”
