Happy State Bank and Trust provides personal and commercial banking services to 19 communities in 28 locations throughout Texas. The bank was looking for tools that were cost-effective and fast to implement and required no internal IT support. The solution also needed to help the bank generate additional revenue by cross-selling overdraft protection credit lines to creditworthy customers when they opened an account.

"We selected Experian's Instant Prescreen and VantageScore because the products can be accessed through a hosted environment, so there was minimal capital investment required on our end. Another added benefit is that the Experian products were already integrated with our existing QualiFile® service, which enabled us to implement these new capabilities in less than three weeks," said Greg Houlette, senior vice president at Happy State Bank and Trust. "We did not need to devote our own resources toward sophisticated analytical applications. We simply draw on the Experian tools on demand through its Decisioning as a Service(SM) capability. This provides us greater flexibility in deploying decisioning strategies based on our specific business needs, budget and available resources. In addition, we are taking advantage of VantageScore, the best-in-class scoring model, to ensure that we are doing everything we can to make the right decisions."

How it works

When a customer opens a new deposit account at a Happy State Bank branch, the bank will immediately access Experian's Instant Prescreen to prequalify the customer for overdraft protection. Experian's Instant Prescreen pulls a current credit report and posts a "soft" inquiry that won't impact the customer's credit score. This information is used to identify quality applicants (screening out high-risk applicants) while simultaneously targeting the most receptive customers with the right offers. Happy State Bank's qualification criteria are guided by Experian's Strategy Management(SM) decision engine tto determine the best cross-sell opportunity for each potential customer. If the customer passes Happy State Bank's predefined qualification criteria, he or she is offered overdraft protection.

VantageScore key to decisioning process

As a key element to the decisioning process, Instant Prescreen utilizes VantageScore, which enables Happy State Bank to increase its population of target customers for overdraft protection credit line offers while managing appropriate risk. VantageScore is the credit industry's first credit rating scale, developed jointly by Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. With VantageScore, consumer scores fall within a range of 501 to 990, with higher scores representing a lower likelihood of risk. All this functionality is delivered to Happy State Bank as part of the standard credit bureau inquiry process that the bank can access through Experian's Decisioning as a Service environment.

"In today's economy, financial institutions of all sizes are looking for cost-effective, innovative technologies and comprehensive credit models that will help them grow their business by expanding relationships with existing customers," said Steven Wagner, president of Experian Consumer Information Services. "Through the combination of Instant Prescreen and VantageScore, Happy State Bank, and hundreds of institutions like it, will be able to do this by making preapproved product offers to customers when they first open a new account. This provides the institution with the opportunity to close new product sales more quickly, since customers are instantly prequalified."