Bruce Curry

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…

The UK’s financial watchdog is now calling on UK banks to continue to provide support to mortgage customers when the government-enforced payment holidays come to end next month. The FCA has told banks to offer a range of tailored repayment options to mortgage borrowers hit by coronavirus.  In an earlier post – Eight Success Tips for Debt Collection in the Pand…

Across EMEA, most countries have moved past the peak of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst the various stages of lockdown being reversed vary, what is almost certain is the harsh economic reality facing consumers and companies as government support lessens and even withdraws completely. This will impact debt collection in the pandemic. In Britain alone the Inter…

In my last post, I discussed a new approach to affordability assessments using Open Banking data. In this post, I’d like to take a step back and discuss a phased approach to collections in the current crisis, as well as the role of omnichannel communications. I have recently presented on this topic with Olly Betts, CPO of OpenWrks, and Russell Robinson, VP for Custome…

Affordability and driving the right outcomes for customers has never been so front of mind for credit lenders. Over the past couple of months, every market has been challenged to deal with credit-stressed consumers, in situations where they didn’t necessarily expect to be. In the UK alone, it is estimated that more than 80 million affordability assessments are comp…

This is a unique time. Just as organisations were getting to grips with IFRS 9 and its implications, the impact of COVID-19 has created the “perfect storm” for collections as regulators, organisations and customers scramble to understand the economic and financial impact of this pandemic. Before the Storm Broke… Before COVID-19, we were looking at how IFRS 9 doe…