Bruce Curry

Now that we’ve turned the page on the calendar, and entered the third year of the global pandemic, what are the challenges facing debt collection and debt resolution professionals? I’ve been in the business for more than 30 years now, and while some of what I see is new, much of it is awfully familiar. Stress on Household Wallets Regardless of the billions in ca…

Customer-centric collections isn’t a new idea, but in the current environment it has moved from a blue-sky idea to a critical initiative for many lenders. In a presentation last month at the Collections and Vulnerability Conference, I explored this topic. Customer-centric collections is not the same as customer-level collections or customer-level view and product-l…

As households continuing to grapple with finances, lenders that offer the right combinations of digital-first customer support will experience the benefits, including improved repayments, debt resolution, longer-term customer loyalty and greater market share. By concentrating on effective customer engagement, lenders will also ensure that they are better aligned wi…

  Top-performing digital collections technology should easily co-ordinate a full range of omnichannel customer contact channels, including social media, text, mobile apps, chat-bots and automated telephone calls. This is one of the fundamentals of digital-first collections. But despite the so-called 'dialler' being something of a legacy process (it has…

I’ve often said that if you need to get really good at collections now, it may already be too late. The time to invest and improve is before you’re facing a debt tsunami. And there are signs that one is coming now. Despite so-called Freedom Day coming and going, financial uncertainty in the UK is set to continue shaping the economic outlook. According to the Fin…

The End of COVID-19 Support Loans, grants, and job protection schemes provided by governments around the world during the past 18 months have eased the financial burden of the pandemic, for both businesses and their consumers. Lenders have benefitted from state measures which have so far helped limit near-term loan defaults. But with discussions around withdrawing…

As the economies in many countries start to bounce back due to successful vaccination programmes, there is a lot of discussion among lender about how best to determine both consumer and SME risk and treatment in the collections operation, given the interruption to standard data variables on which credit risk decisioning has been premised for some time. In th…

On the face of it, the UK economic recovery is underway. According to the Treasury, the green shoots of are all around us, with Britain expected to be back at 2019 GDP levels by this time next year. The government-backed Furlough Scheme has now been extended until the end of September. Elsewhere, consumer confidence hit an 11-month high as the end of lockdown loome…

Pandemic-related borrowing and arrears now top £10.3bn, the number of UK customers deemed to be in ‘severe debt’ has jumped to 1.2 million, while a further 3 million at-risk consumers are teetering on the brink of delinquency. The numbers are starting to reveal the scale of the debt tsunami. Right now, there has never been a better time to plug into pre-emptive, autom…

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has handed out a £26m fine following poor treatment of more than 1.5 million struggling borrowers. It marks the highest fine issued to a lender for what it deemed a breach of consumer credit rules, since a £64m fine last year for lack of support for financially struggling mortgage customers. The new penalty related to…

As noted in my 2021 debt collection predictions, and in previous posts, what we are experiencing is nothing less than a debt tsunami. Just as an actual tsunami is a series of waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, a debt tsunami is a series of consumer arrears drivers affecting the credit portfolio of a large body of creditors. Some of those d…

Throughout the pandemic, we have discussed the debt tsunami crashing over most of the world. Unfortunately, 2021 will bring the after-effects, as credit grantors, consumers and governments try to work through a flood of uncollectable debt. Here are some of my grim predictions, with a focus on Europe. Uncertainty will continue around the economic outlook While va…