Published on 01 June 2009

Reliance on business rules has become so widespread that, when complete power and visibility over them is not in place, control of the business and the ability to react can be effectively lost.

Ongoing issues originating from the current financial crisis are pushing executives in the asset finance market to structure their business models to adapt to changes instantly, and incorporate a high degree of operational efficiency and transparency. A new generation of business rules engine (BRE) is required to replace the traditional and inadequate scorecard-based solution.

The established approach to business rules has been to embed hard-coded business logic deep inside an application or within a scorecard controlled externally. These static business rules are hidden from the business and are difficult to change; updates are technical events that take time, money and expertise to complete - or they don't happen at all. This leads to a compromise in speed to market, and an opportunity for creating a competitive advantage is lost. But by enabling more efficient and effective business rule updates, and a high degree of transparency using non-technical resources, BRE technologies are changing the asset finance industry's systems landscape.

The key aspects of the best-of-breed BRE solutions that deliver these benefits are detailed below.

• The ability to define and maintain your own rules, without being reliant on external hosting or maintenance, provides more control and speed to market - meaning quicker benefits.


• A flexible and powerful rule base allows your policy, not the policy criteria supported by the scorecard, to be deployed. This flexibility leads to greater success in automated decisions.


• All business rules are visualised and self-documenting, so there is transparency in what has been defined. The cycles required to get rules right are reduced, so rules are understood and people get them right first time.


• "What if?" scenario-based impact analysis allows you to see the effects of a rule change on real decisions ahead of time, helping you assess business impact correctly.


• A single BRE can also be interfaced across multiple corporate applications and information sources to create a single source of business rule management across the organisation.

New BRE technologies are not only used for credit decisioning. They are particularly well suited to managing and automating the logic-intensive business rules inherent in the asset finance lifecycle, such as rate-for-risk assessments, in-life process automation, collections management and bad-debt control.

How do BRE technologies perform in the real world?

CHP Consulting is a leading provider of BRE technologies to the asset finance industry. CHP's ALFA Business Rules Engine solution has been used to target specific business areas, from new-business validation to credit evaluation and delinquency management. In one example, CHP was engaged by a high-volume captive finance company to complete a rapid deployment of an ALFA Business Rules Engine solution to replace their hard-to-understand, legacy credit-decisioning toolset with a fully integrated, visually mapped and self-documenting solution that provided real-time, fast decisions using data collected over the web from Dunn & Bradstreet, Experian, and the captive itself.

Benefits that were realised included not only faster, more reliable decisioning, but also the ability for the client to see the credit rules in a visual form such that they could undertake independent analysis of actual results against initial decisions. "What if?" impact analysis allowed the client to model the rules defined and prove the credit policy before implementation. This significantly reduced the risk associated with the implementation.

Moving Forward

Market forces and challenging times are putting more pressure on business models, and business rules, than ever before. Efficient delivery of well defined and documented business rules will continue to separate those companies poised to prosper from those who struggle to cope with the rapidly changing business environment. A new metaphor for business rule management, advanced BRE technologies like ALFA Business Rules Engine can help companies to address these concerns.

To learn more about business rules engine technology and the next-generation computing platforms currently available to the asset finance industry, contact Simon Clark at CHP Consulting, +44 207 5881800.

This article was originally printed in Leasing World, June 2009.