Huw Vaughan

Knowing Your Customer, or KYC, is just as critical in debt collection as it is in other parts of the business. However, a recent survey by FICO and Censuswide shows just how far lenders are in the UK from doing effective customer communication based on KYC. KYC is a general legal obligation on the part of financial institutions to formally identify their customers.…

Two months ago, I posted about why it is important for collections operations to adopt a forward-looking approach to debt management – basically the importance of having a clear and compelling vision. New guidelines from the FCA that call for operational resilience in collections reinforce this point. Amongst the many valuable articles that have been published duri…

If, like me, you have been lucky enough to have continued working during the lockdown period, you have probably never been busier. No early morning virtual workouts or goat yoga for me, nor binge-watching Tiger King. However, I have managed to get hooked on BBC2’s Make Your Home Perfect, which in a roundabout way led me to this quote from architect Frank Lloyd Wright,…

In a world of “digital enablers” — Web capability, mobile apps, VOIP telephony, payment tokenisation, etc. — you would think that omnichannel would be easy. You would think that joining a few customer contact channels, just voice, SMS, email, web, automated payments, app and a couple more, would be quite straightforward. The reality, of course, is very different. The…

In the book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan explains what happens when we choose to ignore the obvious. It’s a fascinating look at why it’s so easy to ignore what’s right in front of our eyes — and I’m afraid that I see many examples right here in the UK credit industry. Now, I’m not suggesting that the majority of credit grantors are negligent, and bury their…

My colleague Bruce Curry recently published a blog on “IFRS 9 & Collections – The 31 Day Time Bomb”. During my various client interactions, I can see that many businesses are developing and testing the impairment models that will give them a good understanding on the financial impacts that the new standard will have on their balance sheet performance, but the oper…