Consumer Disputes System (CDS) was designed, developed, tested, and deployed into production in an 8 month period.

CDS -developed for an anonymous 3rd party credit reseller- was designed and developed to provide the following functionality:

• Dispute timeline management to ensure all disputes are handled in within time limits specified by FACTA and/or the disputes originating state
• Automated credit data procurement and line item isolation to speed dispute initiation processes
• Integration with subsidiary systems to provide a centralized dispute management platform
• Web based application allows dispute processing to be off shored providing significant cost savings
• FACTA compliance by built-in compliance rules and workflows
• Managerial oversight functionality via an administration consol
• Task management functionality for dispute processors
• Document management and automated document creation, including correspondence letters and final dispute reports
• Flexible design enables quick workflow and compliance rules modification

SITUATION

New legislation named the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA) requires credit resellers to offer dispute resolution services for any credit product they sell. FACTA spells out a set of compliance rules that resellers must follow when facilitating the credit dispute process on behalf of a consumer. Before FACTA, credit dispute processing was offered out of courtesy and had no strict guidelines, timelines, and protocols, and therefore software support for the overall process was never developed (the process remained primarily paper). After FACTA, the process became too rigid and complex to remain a paper process and so the decision to invest in a software solution was made. The solution was required to have the following:

SOLUTION

A new consumer dispute processing system was designed and built to address FACTA. The CCSI personnel assisted in requirements gathering, designing the application’s architecture, relational data model, determining what technologies/frameworks would be used, and development of the new application. In addition to application architecture and design, a development strategy was created before actual development started. The development strategy involved logically breaking the application into its constituent functionality sets and then setting forth an order for their development. Specific development milestones, usually consisting of testable pieces of application functionality, were set forth to keep the project on track. This allowed for a phased iterative development approach wherein different teams would be able to work on different components and functionality sets simultaneously, while in parallel the testing of previously developed components could commence. After the design was complete, a mixed team of onshore and offshore developers was engaged in developing the CDS application using the iterative methodology. Java combined with proven open source technologies such as the Tomcat application server and Struts framework, made for an efficient cost effective toolset with which to build the application.

ADDED VALUE

CDS continues to provide the following benefits:

- Centralized dispute processing
- Reduced cost due to process outsourcing
- Increased efficiency
- Software enforced compliance