Buy, Don’t Build or Customize Your Collection and Recovery Platform

It’s not unusual for organizations collecting and recovering debt to become frustrated. After all, collecting debt is hard. It’s a complex landscape with regulatory requirements and consumer demands that can be hard to keep up with.

Before determining whether to buy a commercial solution, build a bespoke system, or customize a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package, consider the tremendous benefits of buying a preconfigured system to collect and recover debt.

Shorter Time to Value

Can you afford to wait years to address your current frustrations as well as other business, regulatory and consumer needs as you grow and expand?

Experience has taught us that organizations collecting and recovering debt think this experience gives them the skillset to build a better software platform. Meanwhile, CRM platform professionals with technical expertise think their software skillset gives them the ability to implement collection and recovery use cases.

Both groups are sorely misguided.

Extensive domain experience and technical expertise is the winning combination when it comes to delivering fast time-to-value collection and recovery software. This is typically found in vendors who offer a comprehensive collection and recovery platform, able to configure processes which meet the needs of the high volume and wide variety of exceptions that are part of daily collection and recovery.

The reality is that this expertise is slow to grow or duplicate. It goes far beyond tracking basic account data, building rudimentary workflow, creating queues, and integrating digital engagement. Here’s a small subset of the many challenges that will need to be solved for:

• Segmentation and treatment automation.
• Payment schedules, payment splitting, interest calculation, adjustments, NSF handling, charging fees, backdating payments, settlements, calculating future payoffs, managing broken promises, and many other aspects of the financial requirements.
• Managing a myriad of different scenarios, such as bankruptcy, deceased, legal, dispute, cease and desist, affordability, fraud, loss mitigation, loan workout, and more.
• Ensuring regulatory compliance as well as being able to quickly adapt when local mandates unexpectedly arise, for example natural disaster, pandemic, and such.
• Managing third party agency and attorney placements, commissions, fees, information exchange, statement reconciliation, and accounts payable/accounts receivable.
• Handling many of the technical challenges around high availability, operating at elastic scale as workloads spike, being able to export and promote configuration changes across environments, integrating with the many systems along the value chain, and more.