As the world slides even further into difficult times with rapidly rising prices, interest rate hikes and maybe even recession the staff of many collections departments must be expected to become even busier than they already are. It has become more important than ever to ensure their productivity is maximised and they are not working on cases where the prospects of a successful outcome or the time needed to reach a resolution outweighs the benefit derived. Regulators are also emphasising the need for collections personnel to spend more time understanding the problems debtors are experiencing and being more sympathetic in the solutions reached.
One of the problems historically has been that deliberate credit abusers, sometimes called First Party Fraudsters, are frequently caught up in general collections portfolios and represent a significant proportion of the total volume of debts. Their debts are notoriously difficult to identify until after the event when they have gone bad. Collections staff are rarely equipped to deal with such debtors and most of these debts remain uncollected, adding to the mountain of charged-off debt in the economy which is already running at over £5bn a year according to Bank of England statistics…