Transforming credit management through generations of change
Credit is woven into everyday life. It helps someone buy a first home, finance a car, start a business, or manage an unexpected expense. Behind every approval—and every effort to help a customer who falls behind—is a complex web of decisions about risk, affordability, treatment, and recovery.
For decades, CGI has helped clients navigate that complexity, advancing from manual processes to automated strategies, risk-based decisioning, digital engagement, and today’s cloud-native platforms powered by real-time data and AI.
Today, that experience is embedded in CGI Credit Studio, our flagship credit management platform, which supports the processing of more than $2 trillion in debt daily and more than $1 trillion in loans and lines of credit.
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Building a foundation for modern collections
Long before digital lending and artificial intelligence entered the financial services vocabulary, we partnered with clients to solve one of credit management’s enduring challenges: identifying the right action for the right customer at the right time.
CACS has been part of our credit management portfolio since the 1980s, helping clients automate collections, prioritize accounts, and manage complex recovery strategies. Over time, we rebuilt and modernized those capabilities into CGI Credit Studio for collections and brought them together with our lending and decision management solutions as part of the broader CGI Credit Studio credit management software suite. By 2008, 7 of the 10 largest U.S. banks and 6 of the 10 largest banks worldwide were using CACS.
As economic pressures changed the nature of delinquency, CACS continued to evolve beyond its core collections and recovery capabilities. During the global financial crisis, we expanded CACS Enterprise to support mortgage and home-equity loss mitigation, as well as foreclosure evaluation and processing, helping banks respond to rising defaults and borrowers in financial distress.
Moving from delinquent-based to risk-based collections
As collections technology evolved, the next step was helping lenders make smarter, more individualized decisions about how to treat each account.
To support that shift, we developed Strata Enterprise, an enterprise decision management engine designed to apply data, business rules, and analytics to complex customer decisions. The solution enabled clients to develop, execute, measure, and refine decision strategies across the customer life cycle.
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We received eight U.S. patents for decision-management innovations incorporated into Strata Enterprise. The technology helped shift collections from approaches based largely on days past due to more tailored, risk-based customer treatment.
This principle of using data to determine the most appropriate treatment would become fundamental to modern credit management.
Putting the customer at the center
Today, technology has reshaped the philosophy of credit management. It’s no longer focused solely on recovering overdue balances; increasingly, it’s about supporting customers as they navigate financial hardship while meeting regulatory obligations and protecting portfolio performance.
Over time, our collections capabilities evolved to support more personalized treatment, digital self-service, and greater flexibility in how customers experiencing financial difficulty are managed. This helped shift collections from a transactional process toward a more customer-centered journey that balanced recovery goals with regulatory requirements and appropriate customer outcomes.
Reimagining the entire credit life cycle
In 2022, we brought decades of expertise across collections, lending, and decision management together under CGI Credit Studio, a cloud-native platform designed to support the full credit life cycle. Its modular architecture gives lenders the flexibility to modernize incrementally rather than undertake a disruptive, all-or-nothing transformation.
Today, CGI Credit Studio combines deep industry expertise along with real-time data, intelligent automation, and open APIs to support more connected, efficient, and customer-centric credit operations—from loan origination and decisioning to collections, recovery, and digital customer engagement.
The platfom extends beyond financial services to industries such as telecommunications and utilities where organizations face many of the same challenges around customer risk, affordability, treatment, and recovery.
For credit decisioning, client outcomes include:
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In collections, clients can potentially reduce collection costs by 10–25% and increase debt collected by 5–20%.
Bringing AI into credit management
The latest chapter in the evolution of credit management is artificial intelligence. We’re applying AI to a challenge we’ve addressed for decades: making better decisions while keeping people, risk, and compliance at the center.
In March 2026, we announced embedded AI capabilities within CGI Credit Studio for collections: CGI launches new AI capabilities in CGI Credit Studio to transform collections operations. These capabilities can summarize calls, provide contextual assistance, and deliver real-time guidance to help collections teams work more efficiently and consistently while keeping people in control of decisions.
Independent assessments have recognized our contributions to this evolution. In 2025, Arum Global re-certified CGI Credit Studio for collections as an “Arum Approved System.” In March 2026, Arum awarded the same certification to CGI Strata Enterprise following an assessment that included complex collections and recovery decisioning.
A lasting role in the economics of everyday life
Technology has transformed credit management over the past several decades, yet the fundamental challenge remains the same: helping lenders balance growth, risk, and business performance with fair, appropriate customer outcomes.
For nearly 50 years, we have evolved alongside our clients—from early collections automation and decision management to cloud-native platforms, real-time data, and AI-assisted capabilities. That history continues to shape how we approach the future of credit management today.
As customer expectations, regulations, and technology continue to change, we remain focused on helping clients make credit management faster, smarter, more responsive, and more human.
