Repayment Program: January 2002 – August 2002
In January 2002, Sedusia needed to respond to the changes in the circumstances of its customers, resulting from an economic downturn and rising unemployment levels. The bank saw a trend of more customers being unable to service their debts.
To tide over this period, in March 2002, Sedusia launched a Repayment Program (RP) for its credit card product. Under the original RP program drafted by the central office (Appendix 1), the principle target market would be customers with delinquency greater than 60dpd+ who had demonstrated an inability to pay.
For Sedusia, its RP was designed to serve as a tool to assist customers in financial difficulty. Customers were offered a restructured loan up to 60 months at an interest rate of 18% (annualised) or 1.5% (monthly rest basis). For the first nine months of the programme, RP bookings averaged $220,000 per month and represented 2.8% of the total receivables by December 2002.
RP Operations
When a new RP account was opened, all the revolving credit facilities of the customer had to be closed and consolidated into one instalment loan account on the Credit Card System. This process was manual and Sedusia had two Full Time Employees (FTE) identified for this process. RP accounts were also governed by an early manual charge-off policy at 90 dpd.