Veda gears up for credit info flood

An impending legislation change for credit reporting has driven Veda Advantage to overhaul its data management system so it can cope with an impending flood of new information.

(The old style archives image by Cyril Vallee,
CC BY-SA 2.0)

Under the a new positive credit reporting system proposed by the Australian Law Reform Commission, a credit information agency can provide more information to be included in credit reports than is currently available under what is known as the "negative" credit reporting program.

Information that can be provided includes the date and time when a customer opened a line of credit, their credit limit and if the customer is in arrears. Under the "negative" system, the only information recorded is if a customer defaulted on a loan or is bankrupt.

With the information from the new "positive" reporting system, Tony Kesby, chief information officer for Veda Advantage, believes that customers will now be able to haggle with banks.

"You [as a consumer] will have the power to take that information and negotiate with a bank. Here's my history of payment, I'm not paying 8 per cent, I'll pay six and a half because I can get that down the street," said Kesby.

Veda has had to update its information systems to enable this.

"We have built everything we need to have built at this stage to handle comprehensive reporting."

As for the rest of the business, Kesby said that Veda is in the middle of a push towards company-wide IT consolidation and virtualisation, which means it won't be looking to cloud just now.

"Cloud computing? We're having a close look at it but I think we need to finish our consolidation and virtualisation program," he said.

Veda is also in the middle of deploying new collaboration and customer relationship management software.