Success story
Premium Credit LimitedIndustry• Financial Services

Solution• OpenText Exstream™

Premium Credit slashes costswith OpenText multichannel
customer communications

OpenText Exstream helps bring control, agility and cost reductions
to customer communications
Results
Reduce annual template
maintenance costs by 45 percent
Deploy document updates inunder one hour, rather than weeks
Cut email costs dramaticallyby more than 99 percent
Provide greater internal control
with no reliance on print provider“OpenText Exstream has reduced the cost of template
maintenance by 45 percent and has made us much
more agile too.”
Phil Rees

Multichannel Platform Leader
Premium Credit Limited

Premium Credit slashes costs with OpenText multichannel customer communications

For more than 25 years, Premium Credit Limited has been helping
businesses and individuals pay for their insurance by spreading
the costs over regular repayments, rather than paying the whole
premium up front. As the No. 1 premium finance company in the UKand Ireland, Premium Credit supports 2,700 intermediaries in its
chosen markets. In 2016, it helped more than 2.4 million customers,
processing more than 30 million direct debits.
As a regulated business, Premium Credit adheres to strict rules, as wellas its own internal service levels. It must ensure that all of its customer
communications conform to the latest regulations. For many years, it
has used an outsource print provider to fulfill the printing of millions ofcustomer letters, agreements, statutory notices and customer defaults
each year. However, the high cost and slow turnaround managing
communication template changes came in for scrutiny.
Phil Rees, multichannel platform leader at Premium Credit, explained in
more detail, “As we grew, printing, assembling, packing, and posting
documents in-house became more difficult logistically, so we took
the decision to outsource. However, over time, the cost of maintaining
document layouts was huge. Not only was the cost high, but the turnaround time was causing issues. It would take weeks for even minorchanges to go live in production with endless testing and adjustments.
We had to find a better way, with greater agility and lower cost.”

Choosing a true multichannel platform

Working with its outsource print provider, Premium Credit had also begun
to use email as a communication channel. However, it faced the samechallenges as it had with print: slow turnaround times and high costs. The
high cost of email was largely due to the print provider needing to invest
in infrastructure, as Premium Credit was its first email fulfillment client.

“We looked at a number of leading solutions in the market at the time
to improve the operational aspects of our customer communications
and to overcome the cost and time issues we were facing. OpenText
Exstream came out on top and was a clear leader in areas suchas document composition and hosting options, and had a better
pedigree, with countless blue-chip reference clients,” said Rees.
“Fortunately, our print provider also used Exstream, and so with thehelp of OpenText, we were able to bring our communication templates back in-house, without the need to start from scratch. This
has allowed us to significantly reduce the delays and costs that we
had endured when the process was externally managed.”
Exstream is an ideal fit for the multichannel nature of Premium Credit’scommunications. As it strives to reduce reliance on print, and increase
the use of email, other channels are also being deployed, such as SMS
text messaging.
“Exstream not only handles the channels we use today, email andprint, but is also able to handle several other digital channels, suchas SMS, which we plan to implement later this year. This means we
can still handle all of our customer communications in one place,ensuring we will have consistency,” said Rees.

Primary objective of cost reduction achieved

Premium Credit regularly has to make changes to its communications
for regulatory reasons. Using Exstream in-house also means that they
can add marketing messages to its customer communications too. Intotal, Premium Credit uses around 80 letters and emails, sending around
4.5 million a year.

“OpenText Exstream
not only handles thechannels we use today,
but is also able to handle
several other digitalchannels. This means
we can still handle
all of our customer
communications in one
place, ensuring we will
have consistency.”
Phil Rees

Multichannel Platform Leader
Premium Credit Limited

Premium Credit slashes costs with OpenText multichannel customer communications“In the past, the high cost of template maintenance and the complexityof making changes meant we didn’t always take full advantage of themarketing opportunities our communications provided. However,
now that we can implement changes ourselves, typically in less thanan hour, we can truly benefit from being able to keep our customers
informed. Exstream has reduced the cost of template maintenanceby 45 percent and has made us much more agile,” said Rees.
As Premium Credit looks at ways to reduce costs, it is encouraging
customers to make greater use of email, rather than printed documents,
where regulation allows. As part of the implementation of Exstream,Premium Credit selected Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) for thedelivery of its emails.
“Exstream works seamlessly with Amazon SES for sending emails.
We now have the ability to send realtime emails, such as customer
password reset emails, as well as batch emails, all managed in one
place with Exstream. Moving to Amazon has reduced our email costsby more than 99 percent, plus a small data charge for attachments.
This is a huge reduction compared to the cost of email in the past,”
said Rees.
As more customers move to email as their preferred communication
channel, Premium Credit will able to reduce its costs further. Not only is
the cost of printing reduced, which is still outsourced, but postage costs
are also dramatically cut, as has the impact on the environment.

“We are working towards a hierarchy of communication preferences,with the lowest cost first. Should, for example, an email come backwith a hard-bounce, Exstream lets us track that and based on rulesthat we define, we can process that bounce, and if necessary, revert
to print. The same will be true as we introduce other channels, suchas SMS,” said Rees.

Ongoing digital transformation

With Premium Credit’s core customer letters and emails now digitized using
Exstream, the company is considering other place to leverage the solution.
“Providing outstanding customer service has and always will be central
to the service we provide. By making more of our communications
digital and real-time, customers benefit too. Wherever possible, wewill use Exstream as our standard for multichannel communication,”says Rees.
As Premium Credit continues to drive down costs and reduce its
reliance on printed output, the option of switching print providers is also
open to them.
“In the past, it would have been difficult to switch print providers, as
they were responsible for the management of the communication
templates,” says Rees. “Now that we have control again, we are free
to seek a more competitive offering elsewhere thanks to OpenText.”

About OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company,
enables organizations to gain insight
through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information about
OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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