Process of Debt Collection and Recovery

In today’s uncertain economy, is your collections and recovery department prepared for the future? Enhancing your collections workflow can help prepare you to mitigate many of the challenges of debt recovery. Do you have the right debt recovery tools in place?

For over forty years, LexisNexis® Risk Solutions has worked with first party organizations including banks, credit unions, utility companies and healthcare companies collecting on their own accounts as well as third party collection agencies to help streamline their debt collection strategies. We help organizations optimize their debt recovery processes and maintain profitable and growing businesses. We recently interviewed first-party collections executives to get a read on challenges they face in this changing environment. You can read the full collections report to hear their insights.

When organizations have multiple data sources with disparate information on the same client, leverage our data hygiene solutions to clean your data and keep the data current using our account monitoring solutions.

Successful collection recovery starts with access to current, up-to-date debt assessment data. With this challenge, companies must compile and compare the different data sources to find the most up-to-date debt account information. For example, one must know if a consumer has relocated, recently declared bankruptcy or been incarcerated, because major lifestyle changes can impact the consumer’s ability to pay.

Incorporating an analytics and data hygiene component into your debt collections strategy can help efficiently gather and clean data for effective debt recovery. Using account monitoring in your debt collection strategy allows you to receive regular updates and make timely contact with a consumer to enhance collection recovery opportunities and improve success.

Our collections solutions provide insights that let you segment and prioritize accounts. Payment Score is a dual performance collections score that rank orders accounts based on payment size and the likelihood that consumers will make payments in the next three months.

Contact and locate right-party contacts and improve collections research efficiency. Bad data slows customer outreach and can create issues around right-party contacts. Utilize our skip tracing solutions to strengthen your debt collections by automating more tasks, optimizing resources and reducing costs.

When businesses do not implement augmentation and data scrubbing techniques, collections and recovery solutions can help optimize the debt recovery process.

Once businesses have their collections data in order, it should be scrubbed for major life events like bankruptcy, deceased, incarcerations and more. Collectors who do not efficiently scrub data could be prioritizing consumers incorrectly, which could make contacting and locating nearly impossible.

Internal data may be inaccurate due to human error, data decay and siloed department focused databases. Businesses should confirm, update and scrub consumer records to ensure up-to-date and complete customer information within their databases. In addition, they should augment any missing information and confirm that they have the most current contact details on consumer accounts.

The Business Data Enrichment Suite from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions helps organizations ensure that customer profile data is up-to-date. Additionally, this solution provides access to critical records while minimizing risk exposure.

When companies have difficulty prioritizing collections and recovery based on clients who are most likely to repay, the debt recovery process should be revamped.

With data driven debt recovery prioritization, companies can update their debt collection strategies to categorize accounts by total money owed and propensity for delinquency. The purpose behind this collection recovery approach is that the more funds that a business can recover at once, the sooner working capital can be utilized. The longer an individual’s account remains delinquent, the less likely the account holder is to pay off debt. Therefore, implement a debt collection strategy that prioritizes debt recovery from accounts that are more likely to pay.

Organizations should incorporate mitigation and litigation processes within debt collection guidelines.

With this step in the collection and recovery process, one can locate people at their place of employment, verify property and authenticate bank accounts, to help decide when to take legal action.

Utilize Paymetrix™ Solutions Suite to help inform your litigation decisions to make sure your business is not wasting resources by pursuing collections from delinquent accounts that are unable or unlikely to repay debt.

When the economy struggles, collections and recovery departments can easily become overwhelmed. The number of delinquent accounts and outstanding debt can quickly increase. Tracking down consumers and making contact can be challenging, especially if they don’t want to be found. In addition, stale and incorrect data only adds to the challenge. Instead of sifting through mountains of data from multiple sources, our solutions offer access to reliable, relevant information.

Debt recovery resources and solutions from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions provide insight into pertinent factors for debt assessment and collection. We resolve challenges to increase cash flow by providing a single system for collections that incorporates and updates data in near real-time while offering up-to-date scoring and analytics.

Our skip tracing software strengthens the debt recovery process by reducing costs, automating tasks and optimizing your resources. Our Account Monitoring product integrates with your current batch processing application and provides daily updates on telephone numbers, addresses and emergence from bankruptcy directly from the source, without waiting for “self-reporting” data. Payment Score ranks accounts based on the likelihood that consumers will make payments and not default within the next three months.

With a robust data collection strategy, we can help you maximize your financial return. Learn more about how LexisNexis® Risk Solutions can enhance your debt recovery process.