Gaining competitive advantage from cloud-based collections and recovery systems

If we could plot a graph of the collections and recovery industry’s transition to cloud-based systems, I’m sure we’d see the fabled “hockey stick” curve. The graph would show we’ve arrived at an inflection point, where most collections organizations are now convinced of the advantages and security of cloud-based software, and the industry has begun to move to it en masse.

But some businesses will benefit far more than others from this transition. For one thing, organizations choosing cloud-native solutions—built from the ground up to take advantage of cloud technologies—will make the transition faster while gaining greater benefits than those choosing cloud-hosted solutions.

For instance, organizations going cloud-native will benefit from deployment elasticity. The processing capacity of their systems will automatically scale up and down as needed. They’ll also be able to spin up new environments, such as for training or testing, for example, in an hour or two. Capabilities like these reduce operational friction and increase agility—potentially a strong source of competitive advantage.

Another source of competitive advantage for some collections organizations will be differentiators in the collections and recovery system itself:

• Does the system reach end-to-end across the collection and recovery lifecycle from predelinquency to write offs?
• Does it provide built-in industry knowledge in the form of best practices templates for workflows, decision/action rules, and user interface elements for these lifecycle functions?
• Is the software 100% configurable by business analysts, including the data model, every aspect of business processes, and every element of user interfaces?

These are questions collections and recovery organizations ought to be asking as they consider cloud-based systems. After all, moving to the cloud is one of the most significant changes most collections and recovery organizations have undertaken in decades. Savvy companies will do more than follow competitors up the hockey stick curve. This is an opportunity to gain advantage.