Grapevine Partners With World's Leading Predictive Analytics Software Provider

Austin Logistics' enhanced intelligence boosts credit risk management for banks, telecommunications companies and retailers

Cape Town - May 28, 2006 - Grapevine Interactive has partnered with Texas-based Austin Logistics to provide superior predictive analytic solutions to South Africa's banking, telecommunications and retail sectors. Austin Logistics is a leading provider of predictive analytic software, providing its enterprise software to, among others, four of the top 10 banks in the world, seven of the top 10 US credit card issuers, six of the leading auto finance companies in the US, leading telecommunications companies as well as a global leader in online payments.

The solutions it provides solve specific pain points along the entire consumer credit lifecycle.

Austin Logistics Vice President of Global Strategic Relationships, Lee Martin, will be in South Africa during early June to meet with leading banks, telecommunications companies and retailers to introduce the company's product range.

'Banking the Previously Unbanked' - De-Risked
"Austin Logistics enterprise software is particularly relevant to the South African market, where there is a drive to provide the mass market with access to financial services, while carefully managing the credit extension risk and collections process" said Cliff Court, Chief Technology Officer of Grapevine Interactive.

"Insight gained through Austin Logistics enterprise software during early-stage transactions can alert retailers and financial institutions of potential losses as well as opportunities. In so doing they can expand emerging customer populations with low risk, and employ more effective credit line strategies to higher risk customers" he added.

"South Africa's sophisticated retail and financial sectors will particularly benefit from the superior credit management intelligence embedded in our solutions," said Lee Martin, Vice President of Global Alliances at Austin Logistics.

Austin Logistics' enterprise software allows these companies to perform credit risk analysis of brand new customers from the first instance of credit card usage.

Among other capabilities, Austin Logistics products also:

• Analyse early on payments from customers to determine the likelihood of payments being fraudulent
• Enables inbound call centres to fast-track high value clients, improving both customer satisfaction levels and retention
• Optimise outbound call centre collections by ensuring that customers are called at times when they are most likely to be reached
• Analyse all collections off-line to determine best cure for lowest cost

The solutions provide site and decision support resulting from daily customer transactions, which can directly affect the customer contact strategies.

Using the product's predictive intelligence capabilities, financial institutions, telecommunications companies, retailers and others are able to categorise customers based on previous spending and payment behaviours, thus determining early on the level of risk as well as opportunity each customer presents. This enables companies to target their best customers and market to them accordingly. It also enables earlier identification of accounts at risk, thereby reducing the number of charge off dollars.

"These solutions will also allow collection departments to predict the probability of getting a contact or promise-to-pay, buying or promoting retention for each account, for each hour of the day, and then match this information with available resources (people and call centre technology) to ensure maximum productivity during the available working hours," Court said.

Predicting the Value of Inbound Callers
Typically, call centre operators use different strategies to segment and prioritise the callers, based on variables such as products and current standing. However, these are usually static, historical views of the customer that do not span the entire customer level relationship

"What Austin Logistics does is add all the predictive intelligence components before the call is handled," Court said.

This maximises the impact of the call, the business and the call centre operation by:

• Predicting the call value (account or relationship level)
• Predicting their responsiveness to possible actions being considered and selecting those with the most impact
• Dynamically matching this information with available resources to ensure maximum productivity and results all day.

Austin Logistics has priced and modeled its products to provide a return on investment within one year of implementation," he added.

Investment Compatibility
The advantage of Austin Logistics' solutions to corporate customers with huge investments in software is that its products are all complementary to those existing in-house and there is no requirement to replace any established processes or systems.

The Austin Logistics' solutions are widely applied throughout a range of financial relationships (for example credit cards, auto loans, lines of credit, direct deposit) accounts and industries (including banking, consumer finance, internet, telecom and retail). /ends.

About Austin Logistics
Austin Logistics is a leading provider of next-generation predictive analytic and business intelligence software solutions that anticipate customer value and behavior to drive more profit from every customer interaction. Since 1992, the company's innovative solutions have helped many of the world's largest financial services, telecommunication, and retail companies to make proactive, profit-focused decisions that optimize actions in collections, risk and fraud, marketing and customer service. The company's ActionSelect solution was selected as one of the Top 100 Collection Technology Products for 2005 by Collection Advisor magazine. For more information: www.austinlogistics.com.

About Grapevine Interactive
Grapevine Interactive is South Africa's premier automated and bulk communications services company. Backed by Brait Ventures, Dimension Data and Vantage Capital, Grapevine Interactive operates messaging services for several of South Africa's Blue Chip companies including Investec, Liberty Life, MedScheme, Truworths and Vodacom. For more information contact: www.vine.co.za