November 2009

The year 2009 was definitely a year of success that will be remembered by all of at Compuscan. Talk about a fresh start! The year was kicked off with a big bang with Compuscan moving to brand new offices in Techno Park Office Park in Stellenbosch. This allowed us to enhance our ability to grow and more effectively and efficiently serve our clients.

Our systems were upgraded to world-class standards which included upgrading to the new 11G Oracle database and expanding our data center’s capacity for production/standby and disaster recovery hardware and software. There was also an increase in the amount of credit data/information we host and our data loading and validation functions also improved in terms of processing times and data quality.

Our IT development team, Call Centre and Consumer Care Department also expanded, meaning faster, better, personalised customer care and assistance for our clients.

We also pride ourselves in becoming the owners of a brand new training centre at our new offices which accommodated all Compuscan Academy's training sessions and all events throughout the year.

Not stopping there with our new attributes and successes, Compuscan Uganda also opened the doors to their new offices in Kampala during 2009, confirming the success they have achieved throughout their first year of establishing Uganda’s first credit bureau. Their success was based on the fact that they managed to ensure the data supply to Compuscan by all the participating institutions (lenders), they managed to roll out the biometric based ID numbering system and they worked diligently with all the stakeholders on intense credit bureau awareness campaigns.

Compuscan Direct, Compuscan’s new company which provides expert advice and credit bureau technology solutions to prospective Credit Bureau Operators, also achieved enormous success during 2009. They completed the development of a credit bureau scoring system that will be deployed by the Iranian Credit Bureau and Scoring Company (ICB). They partnered with CreditScan Nigeria and Caribbean Data Information Services Limited., a British Virgin Islands limited company, by providing superior credit bureau technology that will form the backbone of Nigeria’s and the Caribbean’s first private credit bureaus service infrastructures. We are definitely staying true to our vision of becoming a leading provider of credit management solutions for emerging markets!

In terms of sharing our knowledge and expertise, Compuscan has attended and presented at numerous prestigious, global and local corporate events and conferences such as the “Micro Finance Africa Summit 2009” in Johannesburg, the “African Banking Technology Conference” in Kenya, the “MFSA Contact Sessions” throughout South Africa, a “Credit Bureau Workshop on Establishing a Credit Bureau in an Emerging Market”, in Mongolia, the “International Finance Corporation (IFC) SME Banking Forum” in Johannesburg and the “4th African Micro Finance Conference' in Burkina Faso.

We also hosted our very first company conference at our new offices as well as contact sessions in Botswana in partnership with the Non Bank Financial Regulatory Authority, the Micro Lending Association Botswana & RealPay to discuss effective ways to survive the new the up and coming credit legislation.

Compuscan was also actively involved in making a difference in South Africa’s credit industry this year. To begin with, Compuscan was chosen by Finmark Trust to conduct a research study in collaboration with the Political and Economic Research Council, an American non-profit research institution that specialises in credit access, alternative data and information-led economic development, to find out if the use of non-traditional credit-like data can be used to assess excluded marginalised borrowers for their inclusion into the credit market. The research study identified three promising data sources (rental payment data, telecom pre-payment information and municipality and governments services data) which might pave the way for future research studies and for expanding credit access.

Subsequent to the research study, Compuscan participated in the IFC’s and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO)’s SA SME Banking Program with the objective to address the key constraints that limit access to finance for businesses run by women, previously disadvantaged citizens and other SMEs in South Africa. Compuscan helped to collect and record more than 13,000 credit histories on emerging construction sector businesses while training providers like Compuscan Academy delivered financial literacy workshops and support to these SMEs. In starting to build a credit information database for SME’s, Compuscan has paved the way for many SME’s to gain access to finance. This is a great achievement and has helped to create an environment that will support the growth of thousands more smaller businesses in the future.

Our value adding product range, which has increased by adding 3 brand new software products since last year; i.e. a credit decision matrix (Codix), a credit application processing system (XCellerator) and a new credit bureau score (Compuscore) has proved to be very successful. Compuscore was proved to be very stable and effective (Please read more about this by clicking here) and our current subscribers are extremely satisfied with all the new additions.

In conclusion, our clients will be glad to hear that our data centre has gone green during 2009! We have chosen to implement server virtualization software that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a host server concurrently. Virtualization is a proven "green" software technology that is in essence the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or a network resource; i.e. a huge energy saver.

This technology reduces our energy consumption by up to 80%, which results in an enormously positive impact on the environment; i.e. the "green" effect. We are not only saving energy, we are also reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the atmosphere. Every server virtualized is equivalent to removing 4 tons of CO2 from the environment annually.

Except for the environment, our new server virtualization software also has profound benefits in store for our clients:

• Disaster recovery and high availability of our services
• Ability to provide you with better, more cost effective applications / solutions; Complete data protection
• Protection from communication failures; Improved service levels
• Compuscan has the ability to provide you with new applications much faster
• Vast improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime

We feel very proud of the fact that we can assist our clients in adding value to their businesses, plus increasing their bottom lines.

We would like to wish you, as our valued client, and your loved ones a time of well-deserved rest during December so that we can embrace the New Year with renewed energy. May 2010 be just as great as this year!