The Student Loans Company
The Student Loans Company, wholly owned by the UK Government, administers loans to eligible students undertaking higher education qualifications in the UK. The company, has integrated Data Discoveries software to assist in their tracing operations, resulting in reduced costs and increased repayments.
As the company provides loans to students at higher education establishments across the UK, it has a large customer base – currently standing at over 3 million. Customers borrowing maximum amounts (living away from home in London and borrowing the full amounts for tuition fees in addition to maintenance loans) can be eligible for loans of up to around £9,000 for each year of their higher education.
Student Loans Company customers can move several times during their time at University and also on completion of their courses. The Student Loans Company was therefore spending increasing amounts of money employing tracing organisations to find ‘lost’ customers. The Company wanted to reduce this expenditure by bringing some of their collection and tracing processes in-house, and therefore needed to integrate software systems that would allow them to trace customers.
After evaluating several systems on the market, the Student Loans Company decided that Fastrac from Data Discoveries provided the most efficient and suitable solution. Fastrac, is an interactive tracing product that automatically searches back to a customer’s last given address then using co-habitant and date information, will search forward to identify the new address of the customer. The product contains detailed historical data from 1996-2007.
The Student Loans Company implemented Data Discoveries into its systems and employed in-house tracing agents to maximise the debt collection process. For the financial year 2006/2007, SLC has managed to recover an outstanding debt of £51.5 million. Of this figure, £29.8 million are Income Contingent Repayment loans and £21.7 million are Mortgage Style loans.
Stephen Rice, Collections Operations Manager, commented: “After a full tendering process, Data Discoveries were selected on the basis of best value and fit for purpose”.
The Student Loans Company is consistently providing an increasing student population across the UK with the loans they require for higher education. With around 1.5 million customers repaying loans at any one time each year, the company is utilising Data Discoveries solutions, with excellent results, to continue tracing customers.
Fastrac has proved to be a valuable and effective user-friendly system, it has assisted the Student Loans Company’s in-house Trace Department which consists of 10 full time and 9 part time staff to achieve a 75% success rate in tracing ‘gone-aways’. From April 2007 to present, the Trace Department has traced a total of 20,008 customers with a success rate on average of 80%.
