Nov. 5, 2009 (PR Newswire) -- BOSTON, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) today announced at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference the launch of a new solution to help banks and financial institutions drive increased return-on-investment from their portfolio review processes. InterConnect for Account Management(TM) enables banks to automate account segmentation and risk decisioning for credit line adjustments and cross-sell offers. Now, banks can better identify customers most likely to accept product and service offers, resulting in increased cross-sell acceptance rates and improved customer retention.

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"Providing this automation as a hosted solution will make it possible for more institutions to see the advantages of customer-centric decisioning," said James Taylor, CEO of Decision Management Solutions, a consulting firm focused on helping companies adopt decisioning technologies. "With complete control over credit policies, portfolio segmentation and customer treatment and no software to install, lenders can maximize their agility and keep their operating costs down."

While financial institutions historically have leveraged these types of tools with their credit card portfolios, many have considered them too complex and costly to use when managing deposit accounts. According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the percent of increase year-over-year in total deposits for both commercial banks and savings institutions was approximately 27.4 percent from June 2005 to June 2009. Recent Equifax research has shown that while consumer debt has declined year-over-year more than $440B since 2000, the average personal savings rate reached its highest levels in the past decade during Q2 and Q3 2009.

InterConnect for Account Management enables banks to cost-effectively evaluate portfolio changes in both credit and deposit accounts - resulting in a comprehensive view of customers and their relationships with the financial institution. The solution provides a consolidated look at each customer within the portfolio and segments these customers based on behavioral and transactional data from Equifax, third-party sources and internal databases. With this insight, banks can better measure individual risk and assess the overall ROI associated with an account.

"Current economic pressures make consistent account management especially important for today's financial institutions, which must address increasing regulatory requirements and respond quickly to changing market needs," said Dann Adams, president, US Information Solutions.