A Sound Business Practice, Auditing Your Collection Vendors

by Thom Majka
DebtNext Solutions, LLC

The collection industry is extremely competitive with a consistent marketing message coming from third party agencies and collection law firms: “Do business with us because we have the best people, systems, technology and rates.” The other area that is consistent with the marketing message is change. The people, systems, technology and rates with third party collection vendors are always going through some type of change.

Millions of dollars of receivables are placed for collection every year with third party vendors, either agencies or collection attorneys. These past due receivables come from different size companies and industries, all with the same needs, getting the best recovery and lowest contingent rate, to maximize net return. Because of their impact on your cash flow, knowing as much information as possible about the third party vendors is a sound business practice. Oftentimes, even the relatively simple process of establishing and documenting service levels expected from the third party vendor is overlooked. The fire drill between the collection vendor and their customer usually begins when a compliance, rate, or service issue occurs. Only then does someone look at the terms and conditions of the contract.

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Preparing Commercial Files for Litigation

by Rhett Frimet
Levy Diamond Bello & Associates LLC

Let's face it. As a commercial agency, none of us wants to forward a file to local counsel unless absolutely necessary. First, there may be the feeling of failure i.e. that the collector(s) could not, for whatever reason, get the job done. The multitude of reasons for a file not being collected by an agency in house are simply too broad to explore here, so in the name of brevity, let us just presume that the decision was made by the agency and the client to forward the file. Second, litigation can be a protracted process, regardless of the jurisdiction, the direct costs in maintaining that file generally increase due to communicating between and among local counsel, the client, and, sometimes, the law list. Furthermore, the percentage of the overall fee attributable to the agency is a much smaller percentage than if the file was collected in-house. However, we are in a service industry and our clients depend on us to follow every file through to its ultimate disposition.

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Fair Isaac and ACC/YouveGotClaims Announce Partnership
December 11, 2006

Automated Collection Control, Inc. (acc), creator and owner of the service known industry-wide as YouveGotClaims, and Fair Isaac Corporation, the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, today announce a partnership. The partnership is strategic to the collections and recovery markets, and will provide clients of either organization seamless access to leading collection and recovery products and services.

YouveGotClaims clients can now access a comprehensive set of collection and recovery services available on Fair Isaac’s ScoreNet network. For instance, YGC clients now have the ability to store, view and forward images of documents through ScoreNet’s Document Storage and Presentment service, while connecting to ScoreNet’s Debt Placement service gives users the ability to securely manage the transfer of data between credit grantors, collection agencies, attorneys, debt buyers and internal recovery departments. Other services offered through ScoreNet include Analytic services, Scoring services, Data Request services and ScoreNet’s Event-Based Trigger service.

Reciprocally, Fair Isaac’s collection and recovery clients can now access all YouveGotClaims services, including its industry-leading collection litigation tracking and management service. This will provide additional capabilities for managing, tracking and reporting on the status of collection claims assigned to attorneys.

“Being able to provide multiple services through one platform will help us be more effective in the delivery and maintenance of these services, and will dramatically reduce the current cost to clients of having to negotiate each type of service individually” says Rob Fite, Fair Isaac Client Service Partner.

Warren S. Rosenfeld, President and General Counsel of Automated Collection Control, Inc., states that “This partnership, between respected industry leaders, will be a great gain for collection and recovery organizations wanting better quality bundled services. We are excited about the partnership, and we are excited about the opportunity to do work with the litigation portfolios of many of Fair Isaac’s long-standing customers. We know that our customer base will respond eagerly to the news that they can now access document imaging services, scoring and analytics through their current and ongoing use of YouveGotClaims. We also look forward to working with organizations not now a customer of either company that want to realize greater efficiencies in their collection, recovery and litigation operations.”

ABOUT AUTOMATED COLLECTION CONTROL, INC.

Automated Collection Control, Inc. is privately held and is headquartered in Montville, New Jersey, with additional offices in the Washington, D.C. and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Its YouveGotClaims service is used by many of the leading debt buyers, collection agencies, and law firms in the country. The service electronically delivers new collection claims to an unlimited number of law firms and other service providers, and then allows the senders of the claims to track, manage and analyze both the collection portfolios and the vendors servicing those portfolios. Approximately 150,000 new collection claims each month are currently distributed to law firms and other service providers over the YGC format. Approximately 5 million open and ongoing cases are tracked and managed monthly using YouveGotClaims, with debt owners also analyzing the productivity, activities and efficiency of the more than 400 law firms that are currently compliant with the YouveGotClaims format, product and service. In addition to its core YGC service, the company also has an attorney network consulting service. Founded in 2001, more can be learned about the company at www.YouveGotClaims.com.

ABOUT SCORENET NETWORK

ScoreNet network is Fair Isaac’s data and service provider platform solution and provides unparalleled access between partners and clients in the consumer credit collections and recovery industries. The network provides the ability to effectively manage and optimize the distribution of information across the transaction life cycle, and applies analytics and decisioning capabilities to make it easier for companies to automate and improve the most challenging decisions.

ABOUT FAIR ISAAC CORPORATION

Fair Isaac (NYSE: FIC) makes decisions smarter. The company’s solutions and technologies for Enterprise Decision Management give businesses the power to automate more processes, and apply more intelligence to every customer interaction. Through increasing the precision, consistency and agility of their decisions, Fair Isaac clients worldwide increase sales, build customer value, cut fraud losses, manage credit risk, reduce operational costs, meet changing compliance demands and enter new markets more profitably. Founded in 1956, Fair Isaac powers hundreds of billions of decisions per year in financial services, insurance, telecommunications, retail, consumer branded goods, healthcare and the public sector. Fair Isaac also helps millions of individuals manage their credit health through the www.myfico.com website. Visit Fair Isaac online at www.fairisaac.com.

Fair Isaac and ScoreNet are registered trademarks of Fair Isaac Corporation, in the United States and/or in other countries.

Further information about each company can be obtained by accessing www.fairisaac.com, scorenet.fairisaac.com and www.YouveGotClaims.com.

Commercial Law League of America
  (CLLA)

77th Annual Chicago Conference
April 19-22, 2007
  Westin Michigan Avenue Hotel
  Chicago, IL