Background

We helped Wells Fargo turn negative ROA portfolios into profitable ones. After aggressive portfolio purchases, Wells Fargo had several negative earning portfolios.

The work involved focused on:

  • Identifying profitable vs. unprofitable customers
  • Reducing unprofitable accounts by best-fitting terms and improving collections
  • Building profitable accounts via targeted marketing & offers to a segment of one

Challenge

  • Quickly build positive earnings
  • Remediate underlying risk issues
  • Create product value to attract and retain best customers
  • Encourage desirable customer behavior with a scalable product strategy

Solution

  1. Performed customer-level assessment on over 20 million accounts to identify financial performance gaps and causes.
  2. Developed and deployed remediation strategies for existing customers. a) Risk Reduction - built PD and time to default models and designed advanced collection strategies. b) Incentivizing Positive Behaviors - design of experiments identified profitable features and communication strategies. c) Retaining Profitable Relationships - used profitability response models to avoid negative and non-responders.
  3. New account acquisition strategy to target and incent profitable relationships. a) Improved Risk Modeling - adding product, non-credit & market data. b) Improved Target Marketing - models for utilization and probability of response enabled profit estimates and cost/benefit measures for each prospect. c) Product Revision - aligned products with desired behaviors and performance. We then back solved for optimal offers with a segment of one.

Results

  • Increased ROA from -2% to 3.5% in 2 years
  • Grew ROA at 15% per year