Tales from the Trenches of Debt Management
February is upon us and for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we are entering what we hope to be the last month of Winter and looking forward to Spring. And while February is the shortest month of the year (even in a leap year), there are lots of celebrations that occur in February…Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day, Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year, and Rio Carnival to name a few.
What you may not know is that the word February comes from the Latin word Februa, which means to cleanse or purify. OK, not the best use of my four years learning Latin!
But it did get me thinking about February. For many of us, the weather is cold and dreary, and we look forward to spring and all the renewal it brings. Many of us do spring cleaning to ready our homes for visitors. But what do we do in our workplaces, and is it time for a purification of your debt management solution?
It has been a weird time in debt management. During the pandemic, we watched consumers pay down their debt and put more money into their savings. Post-pandemic, economists have disagreed on whether we are headed for a recession. As I listen to the news, it feels like there have been a lot of mixed messages.
There continue to be a lot of variables that make it hard to see what the future holds. We have inflation pressures, the continuing debate on ‘remote work,’ the unknown impact on the restart of student loan repayment in the USA, the challenge of attrition, and the list goes on and on. So, if you are a leader in the debt management space, it can be difficult to decide when it’s time to bring your organization into the 21st century with modern debt management software.
It is never easy to get funding to replace your existing debt management software. I know this firsthand. If you wait for a recession, you will be heads down focused on stopping the bleed of losses. When the economy is doing well, the collection and recovery departments seldom get any attention or funding unless there is a compliance issue or a technology vulnerability.
My advice? Look at your current solution and objectively ask yourself whether it’s meeting your needs, the needs of your collectors, and the needs of your customers. How many workarounds have you had to deploy to mitigate the limitations of your existing solution? And if you have added software and hardware to manage your portfolio, ask yourself whether this is the best use of your firm’s money and time. Downturns in the economy are cyclical, and the last one was quite painful. Many banks went out of business. Is your current debt management solution up to the challenge when another downturn occurs?
If you are ready to use this February to cleanse your operation of outdated technology, we would love to hear from you. We are Telrock Systems, providers of the most innovative collections and recovery solution, Optimus, and our flexible integration solution SmartConnect.