F&P Finance steps up the war on crooks

By Duncan Bridgeman

Friday 12th March 2004

With more than two fraud cases a week, it is little wonder Fisher & Paykel's new Farmers Finance division is keen to sort out its customer database.

Fraudsters are becoming a major source of bad debt for the company and are increasingly undermining the success of its Farmers credit card.

But the merger with Fisher & Paykel Appliances is about to change that. As part of blending the two companies together, Farmers Finance is able to boost its fraud detection by merging the two sets of bad-record files.

"We now have a bigger bunch of crooks in our sights," Fisher & Paykel Finance managing director Alastair Macfarlane said yesterday.

The company can also screen potential baddies more thoroughly than a Baycorp search, because it keeps records detailing the kind of products the criminals are getting away with.

"It may not sound like a big deal but when you add all the little things together the savings soon mount up."

Fraud detection is one of a number of growth areas resulting from the merger that management highlighted to analysts in Auckland yesterday.

The company is already projecting cost savings from synergies in operations of more than $3 million per annum. Other key areas include back-office processing and administration, consolidation of call centres, IT and treasury centralisation.

However, it is also targeting several individual growth areas. These include card portfolio development, particularly third-party merchants such as supermarkets, boosting insurance and extended warranty add-ons and increasing "big-ticket" hire purchase sales.

Macfarlane said he expected to lift staff strike rates for selling insurance to more than 25% from the current single digit percentages.

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