The new release represents a complete redesign of the company's core collection system, with new analytic and adaptive capabilities designed to help lenders accelerate collections and reduce operating costs.

FICO Debt Manager 8.0 arrives at a time when credit card charge-offs remain at historically high levels. The new system was built to help collection departments and agencies cope with unprecedented delinquency volume. Among its key enhancements, FICO Debt Manager 8.0 is the first collection system to integrate adaptive control technology, built-in analytics and events-based design, which enable organisations to design, test, compare and continually refine their strategies to improve effectiveness in collections and respond to changes in real-time. FICO collections and recovery solutions are used by leading lenders around the world, including 7 of the top 10 world banks and 8 of the top 10 US banks.

"FICO Debt Manager 8.0 is much more than a product upgrade," said David Lightfoot, FICO vice president of decision management products. "We rebuilt it completely to address the new reality that lenders face in trying to collect what they are owed, avoid charge-offs and reduce attrition. Lenders can expect to see real productivity gains as well as strategic advantage from deploying this new product."

A new user interface makes FICO Debt Manager 8.0 easier to learn and use than its predecessors, resulting in significant productivity improvement. The system eliminates the need for overnight batch processing, which will help collectors avoid down-time or calling on customers whose payments have posted that day.

FICO Debt Manager 8.0 is built entirely on a services-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows for faster and easier upgrades, eliminating the "rip and replace" cycle and lowering the total cost of ownership. The SOA also allows for sharing of data with other FICO applications across the credit lifecycle, resulting in connected decisions based on a total customer relationship view.

"Tighter operating margins, protracted recovery and changes in revenue dynamics make it essential for lenders to re-examine their debt management systems," said Brian Riley, research director at TowerGroup. "Lenders must consider the full scope of the customer relationship plus the latest developments in adaptive control, analytics and service oriented architecture as they align their collection platforms to this decade's business requirements."