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TransUnion LLC, Chicago, has announced several enhancements to one of its core risk-management tools, enabling lenders to detect and react to rising risk factors within credit card portfolios much faster.
The credit bureau added the new features to Express Portfolio Review, a card-portfolio risk-management product it introduced in 2006. The new version provides lenders with a choice of 17 different consumer credit scores to use when analyzing portfolio risks; the previous version provided only five scores.
The 17 scores include three TransUnion risk scores, five TransUnion collection-recovery models and TransUnion custom scores to estimate a prospective borrower's income and debt-to-income factors. Lenders also may process up to 300,000 prospective borrowers' credit records at once, compared with a previous maximum of 50,000. Express Portfolio Review delivers spreadsheet-ready results via the Internet within 48 hours of the request, which has not changed.
The new mix of credit scores enables lenders to more closely track changes in card-portfolio risk factors, such as an uptick in early-stage delinquencies or an increase in open trading lines, TransUnion says.
"Card issuers tell us they are seeing rising numbers of early-stage delinquencies, and these new features will help lenders better pinpoint risk areas within their portfolios so they can take action, such as moving accounts to early-stage collection or reducing credit lines," according to Jason Laky, TransUnion's vice president of strategy.
Though TransUnion designed Express Portfolio Review primarily for use by small and mid-size credit card issuers, some of the largest card issuers also use the product to analyze smaller subsets of accounts within their card portfolios, he adds. "Card issuers coping with this year's economic challenges are asking for additional data they can use to adjust their risk-management strategies, and this product answers that need," Laky says. TransUnion did not identify any users of the enhanced Express Portfolio Review.
