The Financial Services division supports JD Group’s stated
financial growth targets by providing credit into the Group’s
eight Furniture Retail chains and consumer finance via
Hi-Finance to the Group’s two Cash Retail Chains. It also
provides third-party consumer finance to external retailers
and other non-retail related financial services products.
Financial Services is represented in each of the Group’s
Furniture and Cash Retail stores, with customer-facing
Financial Services Consultants who are supported by the
centralised back-office credit origination and collections
environment. The division operates out of two contact
centres, the larger having approximately 600 agents in
Johannesburg while the smaller works from Blake in
Durban, that has about 200 contact centre staff.
While the core focus of Financial Services is developing,
granting and managing financial services products across
the entire value chain, it is also well-placed to provide
extensive business intelligence to other Group operations
relating to customer spending behaviours across the eight
Furniture Retail chains. Using this information, the Furniture
Retail chains can customise their products and customer
engagement to assist in delivering sustainable and
profitable growth of the debtors book.
Non-financial highlights
- Successful launch of personal loans in the Furniture Retail stores with the
book growing to R374 million (gross value).
- Continued productivity gains.
- New system implementations on track with roll out of VisionPLUS and
Capstone in progress.
- Consolidation of Maravedi Financial Services to leverage intellectual skills pool
for accelerated product development.
Objectives for 2011
- Investment in best practice risk management processes and systems were
instrumental in reducing provisions and extending credit to new customers.
The Credit committee has oversight on credit granting decisions.
- The recent acquisitions by JD Group bring new opportunities for Financial
Services while the division continues to implement additional IT systems to
ensure a long-term sustainable business.
- Financial Services employees further improved their productivity.
- The centralised contact centre supports the Art of Service to deliver superior
customer experience with its immediate allocation of queries to the correct
department to ensure a quick resolution.
- Financial Services is now focused on rolling out new business products and
services that are relevant to its existing and new customers.
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