What does the future hold for us?
This question became the central theme of the conference of the Asociación de Profesionales en Cobranza y Servicios Jurídicos AC” (also known as APCOB – Association of Professionals on Collection and Legal Services), which took place on October 26, 2023, in Mexico City.
There was a lot of discussions about the present and future of debt collection industry, what to expect from AI, how it will change the industry and how we can safely use AI technology to develop debt collection.
Viktor Chervanev, the Deputy Global CEO of MBA Consult Group, took part in one of the discussion panels on the future development of the industry, the use of AI and their effectiveness:
“AI is developing rapidly; all companies use AI solutions in their daily work in one way or another. And that is normal. Technologies help us to improve business processes, increase efficiency and level of services.
I see only advantages from AI implementation. The future lies in technology. The future belongs to companies that will be able to adapt these solutions in their daily activities and learn to use them effectively.
MBA Consult works with more than 80 million clients globally. Effective management of such volumes of cases is impossible without robotization, data analytics, segmentation, the use of AI, voice analytics, text, and speech recognition.
– Chatbots and voice robots help us to maintain communications with our clients;
– Omnichannel allows to be in touch with clients in all communication platforms they like to use 24/7;
– Scoring, data mining help to work with a large array of cases and correctly build a collection strategy;
– Speech analytics helps to build procedures for quality control of operators’ work, as well as adjust training programs for them;
– Automation of work with legal documents (scanning, text recognition, data loading).
Using even such simple and popular solutions in combination allows us to achieve significant results. And we really see the financial effect of their implementation: up to 40% reduction in costs and freeing up human resources from simple routine operations and focusing them on complex cases allows us to increase process efficiency by up to 60% compared to traditional debt collection methods.
But there are always nuances that cannot be ignored if you want to build a high-tech company.
– AI implementation requires a serious investment. If you think that by implementing technology once and reducing your staff significantly, you will save money, this is a misconception. AI technology requires constant support, refinement and hiring highly qualified specialists.
– You should invest in employee development. Having removed low-skilled employees and routine tasks, you will need qualified specialist (operators, IT specialists, methodologists, analysts) who can work on more complex cases.
– AI will not completely replace human staff. No matter how technology develops, it is still very far from a human being, his emotions, and reactions. Robot will not understand emotions and will not be able to appreciate the peculiarity of the debtor’s situation. Only a human can do this. And if you really want to improve the work efficiency, you should closely study the cases in which AI is applicable.
– There is a lack of industry regulation. In my opinion, such technologies should have a regulatory base. Technologies are developing very fast, and in this regard, we are vulnerable: people, companies, data. AI brings a lot of benefits, but it can also bring significant harm. So, regulating the industry and creating rules is one of the future challenges.
Debt collection industry development depends not only on technological innovations, but also on the financial community itself. In most developing countries, this industry is just emerging, a legislative base is being created.
Viktor also mentioned this during the discussion: “MBA Consult has been working in different markets for more than 27 years, we have extensive experience in launching companies. Therefore, I can say with confidence that the successful development of the collection industry, as the entire financial sector, lies in the cooperation of all financial institutions, debt collection companies, government authorities and the creation of a strong legislative base.”
– Opening debt collection agency is a very expensive project. Many financial companies are trying to build their own collection divisions and spend a lot of money into their development.
But there are professional debt collectors on the market whose business processes are tailored specifically for debt collection. And as practice shows, cooperation with debt collection companies are many times more profitable than creating own collection departments.
– Another factor influences the future industry development is interaction with government authorities.
Future belongs to association of all market participants in order to be able to conduct a dialogue with government authorities. This is not only about protecting the interests of business and individual companies: an effective mechanism for regulating the industry is about protecting the interests of all financial market participants (creditors, borrowers, and debt collectors), and in a global format it supports to the economic growth.
