Patience nets many virtues: Dana Berry used the patience learned as an English teacher to rope sales into the risk management matrix.

How does a former "phone cop" tackle a vexing risk management problem involving customer credit risk? By combining the analytical skills gained over years of work within the telecommunications industry, the instincts honed through fraud investigations, mixed in with the communication skills, and perhaps a bit of patience, learned as a high school English teacher.

As risk manager for rapidly growing telecommunications service provider PowerNet Global Communications, Dana Berry was confronted with the challenge of managing credit risk for new customers. Combining the expertise of the fraud and credit units, in consultation with the sales department, Berry developed a risk matrix to provide objective and consistent parameters that enabled the company to accurately score credit.

The risk matrix for large-business accounts takes into consideration a number of criteria and weights them to produce a score, determining if the account is accepted and whether a certain level of security deposit is needed.

This risk assessment matrix smoothed the process for both the sales staff, who now know what kind of information they will need to get a contract approved, as well as the credit department, which can now expect to get all of the information it needs up front.

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"It's been really effective in taking care of the resistance from the sales side in gathering information," Berry said. "The matrix provides us with a really good method of scoring every account the same way."

By bringing in the sales department, Berry was able to get everyone on board in order to speed up the whole credit approval process, while actively managing the Ohio-based company's credit risks.

"We just sat down and said, 'What do you need to make a sale?' and 'This is what we need to approve a sale,' and we found the common ground and we built a matrix to satisfy that," Berry said.

This has cut down considerably on the back-and-forth between the sales department, which is focused on signing up new customers, and the credit department, which needs to ensure that the contracts will be honored.

"It took a lot of the emotion and the subjectivity out of the whole credit process. Plus it made the sales people feel like they had some input in how we were doing the work and what we were asking from their customers," said Berry. Berry previously served as director of corporate security for Global Crossing's enhanced services division and as a supervisor of investigations for MCI.

In addition, the risk matrix heightened the company's ability to meet its "know your customer" obligations under the Patriot Act and red-flag regulations by spotting suspicious transactions.

"It makes sense to have both (credit and fraud) groups working together so that we make sure we hit all areas that need to be protected at once," Berry said. "My fraud analyst can say, 'I have a weird situation here and we have an application that matches that situation' and we can take a closer look at it."

Berry also has led the development of the company's first business-continuity plan to evaluate the whole scope of threats that it might face.

"She's really taken ownership to make sure that all of their insurance risks are covered," said Liberty Mutual's Jeremy Riddle.