Stratagem Portfolio Services^® was co-founded by Jeff Bernstein and Mark Kaufman during December 2006. We provide credit grantors and owners of credit portfolios access to sophisticated analytics and strategy tools used to manage credit lifecycle risk decisions, improve collection performance providing cost containment benefits, and increase profitability on post charged-off debt receivables.

“There are a number challenges that issuers, lenders and credit grantors are wrestling with,” according to Jeff Bernstein, the visionary behind Stratagem’s creation. “Servicing cost has continued to be of primary focus, but the experience of outsourcing has underscored the need to balance cost with performance, as credit cost plays a pivotal role in profitability. As the market increasingly began to look towards alternative contact channels for managing contact with customers, including SMS, Internet, IVR and Chat, we began to realize the knowledge gap – credit grantors and servicing providers lacked an understanding of the customer’s preference for these channels. More importantly, the conventional wisdom was to allow the customer TO chose their preferred channel to interact with the creditor, without respect to how that particular choice might impact cure rates and performance. What the market needed was to balance the customer’s preference with the lender’s need to cure the delinquency or debt – effectively optimizing the use of alternative contact channels in the larger context of the collections process, from use of outsourcing and offshoring to leveraging technology to act as a communications medium.”

In the ARM and purchased debt market, their issues tend to be focused on how to manage unit yields and profitability by identifying portfolio segments with higher liquidation and future yield characteristics while controlling costs on lower yielding accounts. Our analytics capabilities, powered by Infocentricity®, allow us to identify insightful segmentations of clients’ portfolios, and allow us to build successful strategies for optimizing unit yields and achive profitability.

Our Strategy Director™ solution combines the use of our best in class analytics and strategy software, powered by Infocentricity, with our world class strategy consulting, providing our clients with ongoing collection and lifecycle risk strategies.

We tend to think “outside the box” when it comes to analytics. For example, we looked at the scoring solutions available to debt purchasers and ARM companies, and found that the “off the shelf” scores that were available to these companies were substandard, offering little incremental value and limited shelf life. What this market really needed was an ability to take a snapshot of the initial purchase transaction from the customer risk perspective, and then layer ongoing operational experience throughout the lifecycle in a real time, dynamic manner. Through our strategic alliance with Beam4D Enterprises and the Beam ARM platform, we created QueueScore™, the first inline, real-time, operationally directed scorecard that allows debt purchasers and ARM companies using the Beam system unlimited monthly usage of the score. QueueScore allows these clients to leverage a highly predictive liquidation score to render servicing decisions to optimize profitability.

Management Team

Jeff Bernstein, Chief Executive Officer

Jeff Bernstein, Stratagem’s co-founder and visionary, has been involved in the banking and financial services industry for over 29 years. As CEO at Stratagem, Jeff is involved in identifying opportunities to leverage Stratagem’s analytic and strategy tools and capabilities in both mature and growth markets, and positioning the Company for success in those markets. His deep expertise in the credit cycle, from origination, account management and collections, along with lifecycle credit risk management, allows Stratagem to focus on specific areas of opportunity for optimization. Jeff also leads many of Stratagem’s consulting projects with clients around the globe.

Prior to founding Stratagem during 2006, Jeff was a Vice President and Global Solutions Leader within MasterCard Advisors’ Global Credit Risk practice, and MasterCard’s leading voice on issues such as bankruptcy reform, outsourcing/off-shoring, and debt sales. His practice was quite active with issuers and financial services companies across the globe in credit risk management and collections.

Before joining MasterCard Worldwide during 2004, Jeff was the founder and CEO of Acadia Consulting Group, an international boutique consultancy that specialized in collections, operations research, and credit risk.

Jeff worked for Fair Isaac and Company as a Senior Consultant in their professional services practice, and as a Strategic Alliance Manager for their relationship with Total Systems Services (TSYS), where he was responsible for contract development, strategic product development and the user group.

Prior to Fair Isaac, Jeff spent 16 years in banking and financial services. As a Senior Vice President at Fleet Financial, he oversaw credit risk management and collections for Fleet’s consumer and credit card portfolios, and managed lending operations and collections at Fleet Finance, a sub-prime mortgage and consumer finance subsidiary. He played a pivotal role in strategic planning and mergers and acquisitions, and was one of 50 executives responsible for restructuring and reengineering Fleet’s banking and non- banking operations in the mid-90s. He has also held a number of positions within the financial services industry in small business and commercial lending, auto finance, consumer finance and factoring.

He has been published in a large number of industry publications, and is a regular speaker at various industry conferences.

Jeff earned a B.S in Business Administration / Management at Syracuse University.

Mark Kaufman, Vice President / Strategy Services

Mark Kaufman, co-founder of Stratagem Portfolio Services, has over 25 years of business management experience in the financial services and consulting industries. As Vice President, Mark oversees Stratagem’s strategy consultants and analytic resources involved in providing Stratagem Director services, along with Stratagem’s commitments to modeling and scorecard development. He also serves as one of Stratagem’s senior consultants on all credit risk and collections engagements.

Prior to Stratagem, he spent twelve years at Fair Isaac Corporation, specializing in predictive analytics, risk management, and decision management.  As a Vice President of Product Management at Fair Isaac, Mark had extensive experience managing a number of FICO’s risk and analytic solutions, including TRIAD, TRIAD Transaction Scores, Fraud Intercept, and various collection analytic products. He also held executive positions managing International and global professional services staff, including analytics, strategy consulting, technical and services. Mark also held key roles in merger due-diligence and integration with HNC and other acquisitions.

Prior to Fair Isaac, Mark worked for IBM in a number of executive level assignments involving project management and delivery of services and solutions.

Mark graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara.