We are nearing the end of the sales pitch, and the exec I’m speaking to is almost convinced. I feel it: he likes the product and likes the innovation but he has to ask; he can’t let me off the hook.

He leans forward and looks me right in the eyes. And then it comes. The question.

“Tell me more about your Compliance Management System.”

Without a word, I reach into my bag, and grab a folder. It’s massive with hundreds of pages, all properly categorized: FDCPA, TCPA, FCRA, ECOA, GLBA, you-name-it. Here are the results of hundreds, maybe thousands of work hours. I slap it on the table, and it makes a loud noise even in this cavernous conference room.

We both smile. I passed the test.

Continue reading “Why Start a Company in a Regulated Industry?” →

Our CEO and CTO participated in Finovate Spring’s session in San Jose in May. Catch their video below and watch a live demo of our product!

In my past life, working for large corporations, everyone around me had a well-defined role.  There was a team in charge of the strategy, a team responsible for analytics, different set of folks who took the analysis and translated it into policy, then someone who took that and designed a product solution and wrote out a spec, a project manager that helped coordinate and, of course, the engineering team. I may have missed someone – but you get the sense.  Every six months or so, the division I was in would go through a reorg – to centralize, or to regionalize, or to better define the role of one of the teams above, or to split it into two, etc.  What drove the reorgs was rarely a change in company direction – more often than not, it was the overlap in the roles of multiple teams, or unhappiness by a subset of people about not being recognized, or being pigeonholed into a piece of the landscape that wasn’t attractive.

Now that I am part of the leadership team at TrueAccord, we’ve had some conversations about the best way to split the end-to-end responsibility of building and operating a technology platform between teams of people. As I ponder this topic more and more, I am becoming convinced that there is tremendous value in keeping roles broad and multifaceted – particularly in teams where employees’ average level of work experience is less than 10 years per employee.

Continue reading ““Redistricting with growth” – structuring and defining roles for junior employees” →

Are all debt collectors bad people? Far from it. Still, newspapers are filled with colorful, hard to read descriptions like this one. As we’ve written before, the barriers to entry into the debt collection market is too low, and enforcement is limited enough to draw people who skirt the law for profit.

Debt collection can be different – friendly, targeted, frictionless and focused on financial rehabilitation. That’s our vision!

April has been a busy week for us! The TrueAccord team spent time at LendIt NYC, and was covered in Credit.com (including testimonials from actual collection processes!), Money For Lunch and NerdWallet. We’re proud of the interest we’re getting from various publications in financial services – the debt collection revolution is starting to pick up.

Getting a debtor on the line, or to respond to an email, is a hard task. Customers don’t end up in this point if they have money and intend to pay promptly. Therefore, once you do talk to them, it’s important to use that time in the best way possible. There are three things to pay attention to when interacting with a debtor:

• Instill a sense of urgency
• Get the truth
• Counter the excuse

Instilling A Sense Of Urgency

If your approach to getting paid is laid back and non-committal, your debtor will take this approach as well. When you communicate with late customers, you must demonstrate that the issue is urgent and important in order to get their attention and move them to action.

Getting The Truth

Sometimes the truth sounds like an excuse. Your debtors might be in real trouble or they might be tricking you. Asking the right questions will help you determine the facts and act accordingly.

Countering The Excuse

Once you’ve established you are hearing an excuse, you need to counter it in a way that makes sure you won’t need to deal with it again for this debtor.

Did you find this helpful? Download our free eBook “The Top 4 Excuses Debtors Make” and learn more about how to counter common excuses.

Collection operations base their high recovery rates on models allowing optimal utilization of collectors’ time. Since the person to person call is almost the only available too to convert debtors into paying customers, every minute is important. It’s obvious that self-service portals cannot bridge that gap on their own, because they won’t capture intent to pay in exactly the same way.

While we may never be able to move away from making phone calls, the user experience in the collection process can and should be adapted to use behavioral cues to capture payment intent. Thinking of the set of tools as a spectrum, with a high touch phone call on one end and a low touch self-service portal on the other, modern technology allows us to maintain contact with the customer more consistently and longer than before. The key, as discussed in the webinar embedded below, is in designing the experience to use the way we think to capture that intent.

In this webinar about behavioral economics in debt collection, we explore the mechanisms that drive decision in humans, and how to work with these mechanism to identify when a customer is ready to pay, or able and just needs a small nudge. These mechanisms are in the heart of every effective online experience, and they are explained here with their relevance to the debt collection process, with real life examples.