Total System Services Inc. is working on a series of products designed to help banks collect on delinquent accounts.
The first (though not brand-new) offering in the series is the TSYS Collections and Recovery System, which is being used by Commerce Bancorp Inc. of Cherry Hill, N.J., and another bank that TSYS did not name. The Columbus, Ga., company also has a collection agency called TSYS Debt Management.
"We're putting a dedicated focus on the collection and recovery segment," said Julie Austin, the director of TSYS Collection and Recovery Solutions. "With the recent news of the rise in delinquencies, this is definitely an area of concern with our clients."
Commerce, a TSYS credit card processing customer, has used TSYS' collection software since February, though the deal was not announced until last week. Ms. Austin said Commerce is the system's second client and said TSYS plans to announce a third in November. The first one has been using the system since it came out two years ago.
TSYS, which is majority-owned by Synovus Financial Corp., developed the product with Ontario Systems LLC of Muncie, Ind., as an enhancement to an Ontario Systems product.
Casey Stanley, Ontario Systems' manager for strategic relations, said the TSYS version of the software is easier and faster to set up.
"We took the product that already existed and really built more of a best-practices template into the product," he said.
TSYS offers a hosted version of the system, which a bank would use to inform an outside collection agency of delinquent accounts. Commerce, which runs the software and handles collections in-house, wanted a more hands-on approach, Mr. Stanley said.
The systems lets customers who are behind on several accounts "tie the accounts together and create a customer-centric view of the customer in collections," he said. "It makes the customer appreciate" that the bank is "prepared and they have the whole relationship in front of them."
A Commerce spokesman did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
Ms. Austin said a bank that hires several collection agencies could use the system in a similar manner to ensure that customers with more than one delinquent account deal with one agency instead of several.
Previously this capability was only "in the hands of the agencies," she said. "We wanted to bring that expertise further upstream."
The system integrates well with data feeds from accounts that TSYS processes but it also accepts information from other sources, so prospective users do not need to be TSYS customers, she said.
TSYS is working with Ontario and other companies to expand its collections offerings, she said. Its next products will come out in three to six months, she said.
Brian Riley, a senior analyst in the bank cards practice at TowerGroup of Needham, Mass., an independent research firm owned by MasterCard Inc., said that "particularly as the economy twirls right now, having a strong collection system on the consumer side is very important."
Most banks have "a series of Rube Goldberg systems" in place, strung together from distinct products to manage the overall customer relationship, he said.
Card accounts have not faced as much delinquency as other debts yet, Mr. Riley said, but they may start to in the fourth quarter. A system that looks at all customer accounts could help banks anticipate delinquencies, he said.
Alenka Grealish, who manages the banking group at the Boston market research firm Celent LLC, said this sort of software is more important for smaller banks.
They are more likely to face this problem because they have higher cross-sell rates, though they sometimes white-label credit cards from larger issuers, Ms. Grealish said. Customers of larger banks tend to spread their financial products across several companies, she said.
For customers with multiple delinquent accounts at one bank, however, "certainly it helps to have the whole picture," she said.
