You made the big step and decided to work with TrueAccord. Congratulations! You realized that you need a collection company. You want to reduce churn through proactive loss management. You're ready to go. What happens now? Notifying your debtors Before we start working, you should notify your customers that they'll be hearing from us. Read more about what to do before sending customers to TrueAccord. Submitting debts for recovery Sending debts to TrueAccord is easier than you'd think. If you're handy with code, our API v1 is available for use. If not, just send us a CSV or XLSX file and we'll load it into our system. Setting a collection strategy TrueAccord is an automated service. You don't need to be an expert to use it - our experts and software do that for you. There are, however, some parameters you may want to control: What is the maximum discount rate you'd accept to consider the debt settled? We'll make recommendations based on the debt's age, but you can dictate what number we'll use. What is the longest payment plan you'll accept? We always recommend allowing longer payment plans to provide flexibility to your customers, but some businesses prefer to recover fast or not recover at all. How should we treat disputes? We always recommend allowing debtors to present their service or product complaints, if those caused the default. Going through the dispute process might tell you something new about your business, and increases the chances of retention, not only recovery. Using our Creditor Dashboard to follow up TrueAccord's Creditor Dashboard lets you track your portfolio distribution, see how much we recovered for you, and overall account activity. It also lets your operations team respond to incoming communication from debtors, such as requests for detail debt information. Starting to Recover with TrueAccord The Creditor Dashboard also lets you track the expected amount to be remitted in the next cycle. Watch the payments made by debtors who've gone through the industry's most fair and personalized recovery process, and see them going directly to your bottom line. We're happy to help!  

You decided to invest in loss recovery. How do you make the best of it? Structured Escalation The first step is making sure you handle debt correctly even before sending them to a 3rd party. Here are several things to think about and do. How long should you wait? Some customers "self-heal", meaning pay without being pursued. Those who do pay within 30 days of the due date. Track and validate that you're letting the right amount of time pass. Sending customers to collections too late reduces recovery effectiveness - especially if these customers owe money to more than just your company. You need to be top of mind for them to make sure you get paid, and the earlier you start the better. Why did the customer default? Form an opinion on why the customer defaulted. The reason for default is important so you can both invest your efforts and guide your collection company. Does this seem like a fraudulent transaction or a case of identity theft? Expect to not recover anything; sending this debt to collections won't help. Conversely, is this a well known customer who suddenly isn't paying? They should get an extremely careful treatment, both internally and from your collections partner. TrueAccord uses a debtor classification engine that assigns likely default reasons to different debtors, so even if you can't form your own opinion, you can rely on us. Give ample notice and time Start with giving your customer a few days' grace period. They might just be a bit late to handle bills or delayed due to a temporary issue. 3-7 business days are the standard. The grace period and follow up reminders have two goals: first, improve your internal recovery rate. Second, start the escalation process leading to 3rd party collections. Once the grace period has passed, send a reminder. Use your standard mode of communication with the customer (email, text, letter) to do so. If the amount is large enough, follow up with a phone call 3-5 days later. Present the balance owed and make a clear demand for settlement. TrueAccord rigorously tests and optimizes demand notice sending times and content, and gets great results with only emails. You, however, only have one or two shots and should reinforce the message with a follow up. Repeat this step 1-3 times until the "self-heal" period ends. Some customers will deflect with general excuses or vague promises for future payments. Be firm with both types of evasive behavior: remind the customer of the contract they signed, and demand full payment by a set date. Don't let this drag on and don't be dragged into negotiations. These are the realm of experienced negotiators, like the ones we employ in our operations team. Pre-placement and placement notices Once the self-heal period ends, start the escalation process. It starts with a pre-placement notice, a last effort to get your customer's attention by signaling how far you're willing to go to get paid. State that you were unable to get paid by them, and that their lack of communication leaves you no other choice than sending them to collections. State a time frame after which you'll send them to collections; 7 days is a common number. Several of our customers recover a large percentage of their unpaid debts at this point, since no one likes being sent to collections. Once 7 days have passed, send your customer a placement notice. Staying professional through the process is important for recovering your loss and the customer's long term business. Don't be vindictive, simply state that they are now placed in collections, and let them know who the collection company is. Some of the most effective collection notices explain that the matter is now out of our customer's hands. From that point and on, you should let your collection partner handle the process for you. Bottom line Sending customers to collections should be a well designed experience. You will recover money and lost relationships, starting with implementing a structured process for escalating communication with defaulted customers. TrueAccord's escalated interaction process allows you to seamlessly move from internal follow up to external collections, quickly improving your recovery.  

One day, you may receive a letter or call trying to collect money that you don't owe. There are many reasons for wrong collection attempts. You may have a common name shared by many people, or live at an address where a debtor used to live. You may be a victim of identity fraud. You may also indeed owe something you weren't aware of. Either way, it can hurt you if you don't deal with it. Disputing with TrueAccord If you don't believe the owe this debt, dispute it immediately. With TrueAccord, you can click the "Dispute" link in emails or on landing pages, and tell us your story. We don't want to chase the wrong person, either. Use our low friction process to file a dispute, and we'll pause collection efforts as we verify your claim. If everything checks out, you'll be off the hook in a few days. Disputing with Debt Collection agencies TrueAccord's process is not the standard in debt collection. First of all, you only have 30 days from getting the first message to dispute the debt, or it will be considered valid. You also have to do so via certified mail, because collectors don't have an online interface to let you dispute easily, and you must make sure your message was received. Don't pay to make them go away! Any promise and especially any partial payment you make may be considered acknowledgement of debt. Don't tell collectors to stop contacting you, either - you may just find the debt on your credit report. We want to prevent that. Instead of paying, immediately mail a standard dispute letter - the CFPB versions are great. Whenever you get a call from collectors, let them know that you're disputing the debt. Don't engage - wait for debt validation. After initial Debt Validation Many collectors will stop once you dispute your debt, especially if it is for a low amount. Others will send you more details about your alleged debt. This is the time for you to read carefully, and be 100% convinced that you don't owe it. Don't pretend to not owe - false reporting will be costly if the case ever goes to court. Be absolutely sure and be ready to prove it. If you are certain, mail the agency again and let them know that the debt is still disputed. Make sure that the letter includes a demand to report to all subsequent collectors and reporting agencies that this debt is disputed, as this marking places limitations on what can be done with your information. If all of this doesn't help, that would be time to get a lawyer to defend you from the debt collection process. Bottom line Debt collection is stressful, and disputing a debt you don't owe is often more difficult than it should be. Keep calm, understand the details of the debt, and act according to the process laid out by regulation so you're covered. If you have any questions, email us at support@trueaccord.com and we'll try to help!  

Why did we use Scala as our main backend language? Given what we needed to accomplish when we founded TrueAccord – and how we intend to grow – Scala quickly emerged as our ideal programming language. From its interoperability with Java  to its emphasis on functional data structures and economy of code, Scala has delivered an incredibly versatile engine to power TrueAccord’s Proactive Loss Management system for recovering debt portfolios worth tens of billions of dollars. Of course there are solid arguments for a range of programming languages. Java may seem the obvious choice, given its popularity and the breadth of its libraries. But many developers rate Java pretty low on the fun scale. There’s the ever-popular Python and Ruby, which many feel are optimum for the front end, but we wanted to use a single language for the entire stack. We actually started in Python, because our core team was very familiar with it. Python allows you to get off the ground really fast, but as the code grew and more people joined the team, Python’s lack of type safety started to slow us down. Despite our disciplined unit testing, things got messy very quickly. It took quite a bit of reasoning to be completely sure what each function expected as arguments and what it returned. Ultimately we realized we needed something that would make it easy for us to write robust, maintainable and type-safe code without hindering the team’s productivity. Scala was the answer. Interoperability with Java Scala allows us to access Java’s huge ecosystem. Java has been around enterprises for a long time, and there is a wide variety of high-quality libraries for any imaginable functionality. From essential libraries like Joda-Time to the handy utilities in Apache Commons, Java has it covered. It’s also very common to see third-party service providers like payments processors provide Java libraries that access their APIs, which saves us hours of integration work and makes it easy for us to quickly experiment with many platforms. This is how TrueAccord is able to personalize correspondence with individual debtors and make it easy for them to pay creditors via a number of different methods. On top of that, the JVM provides a robust environment to run our code. There’s a variety of parameters we can tune and many tools available for monitoring, artifact deployment and so on. As Scala runs on top of the JVM it enjoys this rich and mature ecosystem. Functional data structures When you are writing non-trivial computations, especially in a multithreaded environment, it’s easy for things to go awry. In languages like C and C++ it’s common to have a state that is shared between different threads. When you go that route, you have to be careful about using locks or mutexes around each access to the state to ensure that no two threads can modify this state at the same time. It’s very easy to make mistakes in this regard. Scala encourages writing pure functions that manipulate immutable data structures. When your data structures are immutable, you can freely share them between different execution contexts, and deadlocks and race conditions become things of the past. Economy of code Scala is a very expressive language. And yet it lets you express your ideas with very few lines of code. When you define a case class, you are actually communicating a higher level abstraction that relies on other types. For example, a Person could be a case class that consists of a name, age and an address. The address could be another case class with fields like street, city and zip code. By defining types in this way, usually in one or two lines of code, Scala provides a functionality that is equivalent to 20 to 30 lines of Java code. The savings here comes from not having to implement constructors, getters, equals() and hash() methods. There are many other examples like this that allow the Scala programmer to write fewer lines of code that say quite a lot. This leads to fewer bugs and less code to read and review. This is not to say there are no drawbacks. Like any technology, Scala is not perfect. For example, Scala code that uses functional programming idioms can be a little confusing to newcomers, but you get better at reading and writing functional code with practice. It’s the same as lifting weights to build muscle. Another drawback is the compilation time. It can take a little while for the compiler to go through a full build, but on the other hand, having immediate feedback from the compiler on mismatching types and other common human errors helps recover that lost time.At TrueAccord, this level of code correctness saves us invaluable time and money in the long run.

This is an attempt to collect a debt. Any information obtained will be used for that purpose. I can’t think of anyone who’d enjoy getting a message that includes this disclaimer. Especially if they have a problem repaying their debts. The mini-miranda, as it’s called in the collection industry, is a mandatory notice letting you know that the debt collection process has started. What happens now? Is it too late to back up? Is your credit ruined? So you got a notice from a collector First, this is not the end of the world. There are ways to deal with collectors and the law provides you with reasonable protection, as long as you follow certain processes. We know you are probably stressed - whether you think you owe money or not. Take a deep breath, and let’s go through it… Should I speak to the collector? You don’t really have to speak to them - when we contact you, emails are good enough. But you should definitely communicate with a debt collector. Communicating doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to pay or that you’re admitting to anything, but it will help you get a better grasp of the situation, and what’s demanded of you. Furthermore, many collectors opt to just sue debtors in court and get a default judgement without negotiating, because they’re used to debtors refusing to talk. If you communicate, you will probably completely avoid any legal issues - and there’s literally no downside other than some time spent. Do I really owe this? First you may feel like you don’t really owe what you’re told you’re owed. Have you read the contract you signed with this creditor? Have you read all the fine print? Many contracts stipulate late fees, early termination fees and other liabilities that you may not be aware of. If you are a merchant using a payment gateway, for example, you probably don’t know that you’re liable for your customers perpetrating fraud; but indeed you are. Be aware of the facts, because lack of knowledge works against you and will get you a worse settlement. If you’re not sure whether you really owe anything, a good first step would be to ask for debt verification. You won’t get your debt cancelled so easily but the process grants you a few days of quiet when the collector gathers this information, and it will get you more information about the debt if you don’t remember it. The only catch? Debt collectors require that you send a written letter to initiate the process, and may aggressively call you in the meantime. You also have only 30 days from the day of the first notice to mail that request for additional information. When you work with our Loss Management process, a simple online form will do; but be careful when dealing with debt collectors that prey on that time gap. Negotiating with a collector First point about negotiation: unless you were utterly wronged, you should pay your debt. If you were wronged and can prove so in court, this guide may not be for you - you could have a legal case. If you don’t, however, whomever you are, you’re not a deadbeat and you’re willing to work out your issues - you just need some time. Don’t mislead yourself: not paying hurts other people. It hurts the stability of the business they work at, it forces the business to make up for the loss someplace else, and it is generally the wrong thing to do in a civilized society. There’s a reason why the law allows one to sue if a contract isn’t honored - we expect people to be true to what they agreed to do (provide a service, pay a bill) because otherwise, we won’t be able to trust one another. You’re not exempt from that. Not paying can hurt your financial prospects as well. You may think that having negative marks on your credit report is unavoidable. Maybe you’re close to giving up. Don’t let yourself lose hope and become oblivious. With the right type of help, you’ll be able to get back to financial safe ground - it will just take time. So, when do you negotiate? Negotiating with a collector is aimed at balancing the potential negative effects of non payment (ruined credit if you get reported, hurt reputation, and potential legal action) with your own solvency. Inefficient collectors profit from interest and fees on payment plans; when you work with TrueAccord, we never add any interest or fees to get profitable at your expense. In addition, as long as your debt hasn’t been sold, creditors will limit the size of settlement discount that you can get, even if you pay the whole amount in one shot. Between potential add-on costs and the limitation on collectors’ ability to discount the debt, what should you aim for? The best option is to try and get a 10% discount for a single payment for the whole discounted amount, if you can get that. Try to get a better deal for a direct debit; you’ll have a harder time getting a good deal with a check or card payment. Some collectors are able to take online payments; try to work with those, and follow their charges to not get overcharged. The second best option is a flexible payment plan for the whole amount. As noted before, most collectors will tack on interest and fees to the plan, so you’re better off with a short term plan. If you’re paying the whole amount in large chunks (bigger than 20% of the total for each payment), you may be able to scrape a small discount off the top. Make sure that you get the payment plan’s details in writing, and follow up on its progression with every payment. Also, it’s most important that you make sure your actual debt is paid first. If payments go to fund interest and fees, you’ll be digging yourself further into a hole instead of solving your debt problem. A good collector will help you do that, instead of milking you as much as they can. Afterthought Being in debt isn’t fun, but is a manageable situation when you work with the right type of partner. If you find yourself in debt, do your best to choose the right collection partner for you; one that cares about your long term prosperity. Deal with debt early, keep all documentation and make sure that you’re informed regarding the contract you signed and your right. And, most importantly, never take credit obligations you don’t think you can meet; the results can be devastating!  

Some customers just won’t pay you, or charge a payment back once a service was provided. It is a normal business phenomenon, for some companies and sectors more than others. Some of the companies we’ve worked with have seen 3% and more of their revenue eaten up by losses. Not knowing why, most forget about losses and try to view them as the cost of doing business, while focusing on detection and prevention of loss-causing customers before those are caused. The end result? Hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of lost dollars left unclaimed, and a business that could have grown much quicker that ends up focusing on limiting its ability to sell in fear of defaulting customers instead of selling more. To a small business, this can be a death blow. There’s a better way to approach this unfortunate situation. Proactive Loss Management is more than simply managing accounts receivables; it’s a process that combines several activities to follow up and understand and resolve losses and their causes in a systematic way. When implementing these activities, some of our customers saw immediate upside, up to 10% of recovery within a few weeks. Imagine cutting down losses by 10% with a simple process; how much more can you sell in a month? Some of our customers found that they are not only able to take more risks, but that customers who went through this process and recovered created top line growth that was bigger than the recovered amount, up to 10% increase in revenues. How can that be done? Proactive Loss Management is comprised of several activities: Root cause analysis The first question to ask about any defaulting customer is “why?”. Why aren’t they paying? You’ll discover that customers have many different reasons and that those reasons will inform your operational processes and make you more efficient and improve your product. You may discover that your invoices have a distorted layout, or that your descriptor on the credit card’s billing statement is wrong and prompts chargebacks, or that the your legal contract is ambiguous. Any of these creates losses that are a result of a misunderstanding, more than malicious intent. All are also fixable and can make a huge difference in payments in a short time. Furthermore, not only will you solve existing customers’ issues, you’ll be able to prevent them from repeating for future customers, compounding this positive effect. Personalization As losses mature you’ll run across more customers with unique reasons for non-payment. Much like optimizing front end conversion, personalizing the Loss Management experience is important and reaches both better results and greater customer satisfaction. Segment your customers based on their personal details and financial situation, both those that you had before they defaulted and what you learn based on their responses after they have. The more accurate you are about addressing a customer’s pain, the more likely they are to respond to you and be willing to work with you on a solution; try to force them into a one-size-fits-all solution, and you’ll easily lose them and any recovery opportunity. Follow up Forgetting to pay is easy. Even if you’ve reached an agreement with a customer, staying top of mind so they’ll pay when they need to is important. Whether they are in a grace period or losses have already materialized, you need to be friendly but firm and demand the payment you are owed. Multiple-channel escalating follow up is best for getting customers to respond and tell you why they’re not paying, or pay when they need to. Constantly optimizing on the content and design of your communication will help you get more responses faster. Retention Proactive Loss Management is focused on retention. By thinking about losses as lost relationships rather than just a sum of money that needs to be recovered, merchants enjoy better customer retention. We’ve seen customer lifetime value grow significantly with customers going through Proactive Loss Management since, counterintuitively, going through a default that’s managed the right way increases brand trust and loyalty. Bottom line It’s easy to forget about dealing with receivables. It’s an unpleasant job, definitely not the delightful part of your product and offering. Still, it’s an important one - for the money you’re losing, for the relationships you can recover, and for the insights it can generate. Start today and you may see benefit in just a few weeks!  

How many times have you read this headline? How many times have you discovered something that you didn't really know already? We wanted to change that trend because frankly, there are things we want you to know so you can enjoy them when you're working with us. Easy communication: we try everything we can to not call you at inconvenient times. In fact, we'd rather get you using our online portal to negotiate easy solutions to your outstanding balances. Much like you, we lead busy lives and want to take care of bills at our own pace, when it's the right time for us. No hidden fees: we are upfront about what we ask you to pay and we don't invent fees like administration or convenience fees. We believe in transparent processes and that means that even longer payment plans that we accept will carry minimal to no additional cost from TrueAccord. Disputing charges: think that you were wronged? We want to hear about it. We may not be able to change the outstanding amount but we've been successful with getting debtors and creditors to talk and settle. If you have a valid concern, we won't badger you with the dry letter of the law - we want to help more than just recover as much as possible, as fast as possible. See, these are the things we want you to know. We know getting into a recovery process isn't fun, and we're here to simplify it and to help you get through it easily. Follow our blog, follow us on Twitter or write to us at nomoredebts@trueaccord.com if you want to hear more.  

We know scammers roam free on the web, and we know they use people's innocence to extort them for money. What's easier than calling people in a tough spot and get them to pay you money they don't really owe? It's an ugly phenomenon. It's also the reason why we always get our business customers to introduce us to their customers when a recovery process begins - there's so much to worry about, why have to worry whether you're being scammed? Turns out it doesn't stop there. Some of these scammers would rather not do the dirty work themselves, and they're looking for someone to do it for them. We never imagined it works that way in recovery services, so imagine our surprise when we got an email from a previously unknown connection, providing us with the details of a debtor and a debt and urging us to work on it. Pretty aggressively so, I must add. We won't disclose private information so there's not much we can say about Mr X, the alleged debtor. A quick investigation exposed the scammers, and we're hopeful that Mr X won't be troubled by fake collection calls. Given how easily his information was given, we're concerned it's not the last he'll hear from fake collectors. This case raises an important issue. People trade personal information too easily. Who knows where his customer's details got exposed; too many companies feel that consumers' information isn't worth protecting once they owe money. This couldn't be farther from the truth; if anything, sensitive information must be protected more rigorously when its discovery might embarrass consumers. Apparently, some players don't care and will use any chance they have to make a dime. Luckily, this time they emailed the wrong company. Finally, here are some words of advice: Contacted by a collector? Make sure you understand who that company is and how the debt was placed with them. One of the things we allow consumers to do in many cases is settle directly with their creditor, reducing their concern with paying us directly, before they get to know us. Got a suspicious email? Search for it online. Many scam catcher websites will warn you about common scams. If your identity was stolen or information about you is publicly available without your consent, it could be a violation of the law. Read about identity theft in the FTC's website, and be vigilant about sharing your information with risky websites. Did you get fake collection calls or emails? Tell us!  

Many businesses, especially web based ones, live and die by customer acquisition and growth. They invest money and time in new ways to attract new users to their service, while under investing and sometimes neglecting retention efforts. While growth is important, retaining customers is a much more profitable activity - active current customers spend more, and are more likely to use other services your offer. Within that group of current customers, customers who churn sometimes provide you with the most important feedback. Why do customers churn, and end up owing you money? There could be many reasons, and often times the least of which is some malicious intent on these customers' part. Some find that your product wasn't what they expected; some have billing issues; others had a negative service experience. What do you gain from talking to these customers? They are often your most vocal critics. While that criticism is hard to listen to or read, and sometimes even exaggerated, it stems from a genuinely bad experience. Each customer who's willing to talk to you represents dozens, maybe hundreds of others who disappear without saying a word. Listen to the content rather than the style, and you'll discover a plethora of relevant product and process feedback. They care. Some unhappy customers will pay your dues then disappear off your platform forever, without ever voicing their concerns. Some of your defaulted customers care enough, feel strongly enough, that they opt to not pay and get in trouble with you. Winning a customer like that back potentially wins you a strong brand advocate. They owe you money. Bottom line, there is revenue to be recovered by reconciling with churned customers. It starts with the money they owe you, but their life time value, if won back as customers, can provide much higher ROI on recovery activities than you may intially think. Approaching and reconciling with churned customers is an art and science. Follow our blog to learn more about how we do it!  

It was an early morning in the summer of 2012, and my phone rang. I didn't recognize the out-of-state number, and didn't pick up. I don't usually pick up unless I know who's calling. The next day, the same thing happened. In the following week I received a call every morning, each time from a different phone number. Eventually I picked up. We have an important message for you, said a robotic voice, please remain on the line. Unbelievable, they're calling me and I need to wait? Still, the calls would just continue. I stayed on the line. Within a minute I was already deep in conversation with a rude, aggressive debt collector who promptly notified that I have a late payment. I then realized why: I had forgotten to pay the balance for a card I had with one of the big retail chains. It happens, and luckily, I could afford to pay it. Not everyone can. I offered to pay with my credit card. No, said the person aggressively, that is not acceptable. I can use a debit card but that will cost me a $15 "convenience" fee. Heck, I'll just pay with a check, but I don't have my checks next to me. I'll pay later today, I told her. TODAY, she said, with an angry tone. Today, I accepted. That experience stayed with us when we started thinking about TrueAccord. Why not treat people with respect? Why subject them to robotic callers and hidden fees? Why not offer convenient, flexible ways to pay? That rude collector and the negative experience I underwent simply due to forgetting a payment has spawned a business plan. We can do better. We can help businesses get paid without creating alienation between them and their customers, and we can bring back feedback on what doesn't work and why disgruntled ex-customers are reluctant to settle a debt. We can help debtors settle without pushing them down more or making them feel disrespected. The result is what you see here. If you got an email from us, you can count on us to work with you. Debts aren't fun, but you don't want to disregard them either. We'll be fair with you, but walk you in a path that ends with your obligations met. We view it as our mission to make you successful and make sure your voice is heard. Welcome to TrueAccord!