Adeptra

About Adeptra

Founded in 1996 by Eric Van Der Kleij, Adeptra carved a significant niche in automated customer communication and risk intervention before its acquisition by FICO in September 2012 for approximately $115 million. The company was a privately held entity with dual headquarters in Reading, UK, and Norwalk, Connecticut, backed by a consortium of investors including ABS Ventures.

Adeptra's business centered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that enabled businesses to engage with their customers in real-time across multiple channels. This platform facilitated automated, two-way communications using voice, SMS, email, and mobile applications to address time-sensitive issues. The primary market consisted of financial services institutions, telecommunications providers, and utilities, with a client roster that included more than half of the world's top 50 banks.

The core of Adeptra's service was its ability to immediately contact customers about important matters, such as verifying potentially fraudulent credit card transactions, confirming payment plans, or resolving customer service problems. For example, when a fraud detection system like FICO's Falcon Fraud Manager flagged a suspicious transaction, Adeptra's technology would determine the customer's preferred contact method and initiate an automated interaction to verify the activity. This created a closed-feedback loop, relaying the customer's response back to the client's system to resolve the issue swiftly, which could reduce manual verification costs by up to 80%. Revenue was generated through this SaaS model, which offered clients flexibility and rapid deployment of its scalable software capable of handling thousands of transactions per second.

The acquisition by FICO, a company with which Adeptra had a partnership since 2002 and a reseller agreement since 2007, was a strategic move to integrate Adeptra's customer engagement capabilities with FICO's analytics and decision management applications. This created a comprehensive platform allowing companies to assess, decide, act, and resolve customer issues within a single, unified system.