In Focus Collections A strong relationship?
Last month, CCRMagazine and ARC (Europe) brought together a group of leading professionals to discuss collections and the relationships that they seek to have with their DCAs. They were: Steve Empson, group central membership manager, David Lloyd Leisure (SE); Neal Turner, head of recoveries, Nationwide Building Society (NT); Nick Watson, head of collections, Virgin Money; Jayne Ireton, recoveries manager, Santander; Sarah Watts, associate director, Shawbrook Bank Structured Finance (SW); Maura Adams, head of finance operations, Nuffield Health; Lucy Swannell, senior recoveries manager, NewDay; Atul Vadher, international credit manager, French Connection (AV); Andy Lawrence, technical lead – Credit Management Technical Team AP&T Collections & MI Aviva UKGI & I (AL); Steve Bale, head of operations, Curo Transatlantic; Andrew Everett, head of recoveries, Fleximize; Negeen Arasteh, head of recoveries litigation, Funding Circle (NA); Matt Baker, senior consumer vulnerability programme manager, Centrica (MB); Katherine Bailey, credit manager, Valor Hospitaility Europe (KB); Dewi Fox, managing director, ARC (Europe) (DF); and David Sheridan, operations director, ARC (Europe) (DS)
What are creditors looking for from their DCAs? NT: For us, we are member-owned, which differentiates us from the banks. We were formed out of a social need driven by principles of mutuality, care and security, somewhere our members feel their needs come first. For our members, who experience financial difficulty, we can make a difference, driven by a desire to do the right thing in the right way. So, in a DCA, we are looking for someone who is culturally aligned in that respect – that would be the primary thing that we would look for: the cultural ethos has to be how we want Nationwide members to be serviced. We have a very small panel of DCAs, which we recently rationalised.
MB: At British Gas, we will very much proceed with caution. Some of our customers, from an age, health, or disabilities perspective, are vulnerable and, where that overlaps with financial hardship, there is a proceed-with-caution flag where they might go down a slightly different
route. We try to understand, as much as we can, about the household – when we understand more about them, we can then try and account-manage and we would only put a pre-payment meter in to try to recover some of the outstanding debt if that was the right thing to do. Vulnerability is now recorded on a household level, so there could be someone in that household who is vulnerable, but maybe not the bill-payer themselves. So it is a matter of understanding and supporting our customers to get the right outcome.
As a result, we are keen to get insight on our portfolios that we pass to DCAs, on whether we have pricing models right on various segments of the business
AL: Over and above the whole compliance and governance aspect, we are looking for insight and trends from our DCAs. Like the utilities, we have a legal obligation to quote on any consumer who comes to us, and so we need to do that with the best available data. As a result, we are keen to get insight into our portfolios that we pass to DCAs, on whether we have pricing models right on various segments of the business. This is something that we are now looking for even more around GDPR because, quite often, the point of sale is the only time that we capture data. We categorise our pricing in the consumer world using external data, which then classifies that within the collections cycle and then drives our APR. Those segments that default will go out in those segments and we track their performance.
AV: If you go down the route of debt collection, then it is important that you tell the DCA what you want from them. If you are expecting something without the direction, guidance, and boundaries of what they can and cannot do,
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Left-right: Andrew Everett; Andy Lawrence; Atul Vadher; David Sheridan November 2017
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