What Your Peers Are Saying: First Financial Asset Management

Matthew Maloney, CIO, First Financial Asset Management

Describe Your Relationship With Experian.

It started off with seeking the types of services that Experian could provide to help improve our overall operational efficiency and bottom line. We were one of the early adopters of the Experian Collection Advantage product. As that has evolved, we’ve used that product in all facets of our business. We then adopted the use of the Debt Portfolio Evaluator for our debt purchasing side so we could evaluate pools of assets prepurchase without having to incur the cost of purchasing Collection Advantage at that time.

How Has Experian Helped You in Developing Strategies?

Bringing Experian from a consultative perspective, they could help us develop some of our strategies. Since Experian was developing the products, and they were developing those products off of the information they were able to receive from multiple clients of theirs, we figured, who better than to have them to come in and provide the consultative services.

What Are Your Company’s Biggest Challenges?

For us, in today’s environment, we have so many challenges besides the macroeconomic challenges we’re all facing, we have little microeconomic issues within our business to try to understand how we can efficiently and effectively work — lower-yielding accounts to continue to meet our clients’ work standards while at the same time not pour good money after bad accounts.

What Would You Like to See More of From Experian?

The wish list for me is that some of the ideas from some of the brainstorming sessions that come out of these council events they would actually transcend and convert to an actual product offering that Experian has. And I think that this morning, David Ingram said that Experian had an initiative where they had allocated roughly $1 million to a project that really was born from last year’s council meeting in Seattle.