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.

Debt collections is a litigious market. Whether debt collectors sue debtors for payment, or the cottage industry of consumer advocates that evolved to sue for every technical violation, you're bound to get your day in court. Couple that with a strong Federal regulator and public scrutiny, and it's obvious why you need to learn more about regulation and how to adhere to it. If you're just starting to learn about debt collection, this free eBook will give you a first taste: Learn who regulates debt collectors Get an introduction to the relevant Federal rules Learn about the top complaints debt collectors face, and how to prevent them Ready to get an introduction? Download our eBook and learn more!

TrueAccord was built as an automated system from day one. Customer care experts handle the cases that needed special care, and teach the machine how to improve. We learned how to do that through a lot of hard work and testing, and we'd like to share some of that with you. In this free eBook, you'll: Learn about the different types of automation Read from TrueAccord's experience about the benefits of automation Read about the three keys to a successful automation project Click through and download it!  

The technical and analytical vision behind TrueAccord is to add data-driven decisions to the communication model in debt colelction. Digital communication enables better data collection, and better understanding of customer behavior patterns. We can collect and observe open, click and browsing patterns that sometimes do more to explain how to engage with a customer than explicit communication. By connecting customer behavior to their mental state, and responding to that state with corrent language, we were able to substantially increase engagement on our collection communication. (more…)

We write quite a lot about the law, compliance, and other "boring" stuff over here at TrueAccord. The thing is, we don't think these topics are boring. Regulation, the law, and working with regulators is something you have to embrace when entering a highly regulated space. Our ability to introduce innovation in debt collection requires multiple skills. Among them, it hinges on our ability to combine forward looking technology with just enough understanding of how to talk about it with regulators. This means taking an active roles in commenting, debating and when possible - crafting opinions about the law itself. This is why we're happy that our General Counsel, Avital Gertner-Samet, was appointed to the Consumer Financial Services Committee of the Business Law Section of The State Bar of California (aaaaand... breath!). Seriously, debt collection is no monkey business, and joining these organizations is our way of contributing our thinking to the variety of voices influencing the law. Congratulations, and to our new partners at the State Bar - we look forward to working with you.

The TrueAccord product can be compared to an automated marketing and sales campaign, focused on identifying payment intent and acting on it. The system classifies customers (we use "customer" to refer to those in debt) by their most probable reason for non-payment, and the "voice" we think is going to drive that to action. Then, it has to decide, out of the hundreds of content items we have, which goes out to which customer, through what channel, and when. Of course, we'd like to learn from history and send the combination most likely to succeed. This raises the important question: what's "success" in our context? (more…)

Ever wonder what the numbers really look like for digital debt collection? As it turns out, pretty good. Our design team released this infographic showing how our system is performing across different dimensions. Happy reading! Click here for a higher resolution version.

When we started working on TrueAccord, we had a limited understanding of various technical aspects of the problem. Naturally, one of those unclear aspects was the data model: what data entities we will need to track, what will be their relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, and so on), and how easy it is going to be to change the data model as business requirements become known and our domain expertise grows. Using Protocol Buffers to model the data your service uses for storage or messaging is great for a fast-changing project: adding and removing fields is trivial, turning an optional field into a repeated field and so on. If we modeled our data using SQL, we will be constantly migrating our database schema. the data schema (the proto file) serves as an always up-to-date reference documentation for the service’s data structures and messages. People from different teams can easily generate parsers for almost every programming language, and access the same data. (more…)

We started TrueAccord to make a difference in the debt collection industry, and that includes shining a light on practices that may not be illegal, but we think are either unethical or promote unethical behavior. We started by reviewing the downsides of quotas in debt collection, and today we'd like to touch on another burning issue: convenience fees. Charging convenience fees for certain type of payments (card, electronic, or every payment that isn't cash) is a common practice in debt collection. Even if the agency you're working with aligns well with your values and expectations (a tough proposition in this fragmented market), you should be very careful about allowed convenience fees, for the following reasons: (more…)