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Competing ‘Creatively’ in the Credit Card Industry
through Exploratory Multivariate Segmentation
Strategy
Jie Qiu
Washington Mutual(94706)
E-mial: Jie_qiu@yahoo.com
Abstract
Since the 1990s, credit cards have become the dominant payment tool in the US, with the
transaction volume up from about $800 billion in 1990 to more than $1.7 trillion in 2006. The credit
card industry has become more mature but is still intensively competitive, posing challenges to
financial services companies. To compete in credit card origination, pricing and portfolio
management, banks and finance companies use methodologies including segmentation strategy and
complicated statistical modeling. This paper discusses the characteristics of segmentation strategy
and describes certain situations when segmentation is more efficient than statistical modeling. Then
the paper introduces a new segmentation strategy—Exploratory Multivariate Segmentation
strategy— developed by the author. Discussion includes how the strategy is designed, the benefits
to credit card issuers, how it affects the issuers’ operation and financials, and the importance of this
strategy to help card issuers win competitive advantages. This method uses two consumer
behaviors, charge-off and collection, as examples to illustrate the exploratory segmentation
structure and its flexibility in combining multivariate exploratory segmentations to improve
profitability and decision intelligence. This advanced model has significant implications for
quantifying, evaluating and managing consumer credit risk for the financial services industry,
especially in today’s tough economic environment.
Keywords: consumer credit risk; credit card strategy; segmentation strategy; competitive
advantage
1 Overview of credit card industry and two business
strategies – segmentation strategy & statistics models
Credit cards are the currency of late 20th-century America. The aggregate charge volume on
plastic in the United States was estimated at $375 billion in 1987.
[1]
The total value of credit
card transactions has increased from about $800 billion in 1990 to more than $1.7 trillion in
2006. Similarly, credit card balances have increased from about $450 billion in 1990 to more
than $750 billion in 2006.
[2]
While the rate of credit card penetration among consumers is
accelerating, competition among credit card issuers has become more and more intensive.
Banks and other credit card issuers continuously design and improve their methodologies and
strategies to fit their business models and consumers’ needs. This paper discusses how to apply
one such approach, exploratory multivariate segmentation strategy, to compete creatively in
the credit card industry.
Banks and finance companies most often use statistics models and customer segmentation
strategies. Statistics models help predict consumers’ future behavior, like expenditures and
response to credit card offers or balance transfers, but the process of developing good statistics
model takes a long time. Three stages are needed to build such models: testing the design,
collecting performance data,
and validating the model. Only then can the results actually be
implemented. The performance period varies depending on different model types, with three
months of performance data required for response models and at least 15 months data for
charge-off models. Compared against statistics models, creative segmentation strategy does a
better job in improving the speed and efficiency of business decisions. Good segmentation
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