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 Pandemic – I spoke about the practical steps that collections and recovery departments can take to help identify COVID-vulnerable customers, with guidance on both the right data to collect and the best practices to adopt.
We have also looked at the Four Key Changes in Collections Since COVID-19 Struck, emphasizing the importance of not only digital collections, but also the increasing adoption of mathematical optimization. This can help operations struggling with the current volumes to identify the customers who are going to be at risk moving through collections in the next few months, and provide the most optimal forbearance solution in each and every case.
With one in six of all mortgage holders — that’s 1.9 million consumers — taking advantage of payment relief, the onus is on us to identify these customers and offer them constructive support through this crisis. Ultimately it is in everyone’s best interest to get as many people as possible back on track with their finances. The proven solutions are there to enable this to happen at scale, cost-effectively, efficiently, and, most of all, effectively for the customer, the creditor and the satisfaction of the FCA.
This is not a case of “need is the mother of invention” — most of the things debt collectors need have been invented and proven, including digital omnichannel collections platforms, affordability validation tools and mathematical optimisation across collections and recovery. This is a case of “need is the mother of adoption.”
We recently held three webinars showing how to user these tools to improve debt collection today. I urge you to watch them:
Debt Collection 2020 - Customer Engagement
Debt Collection 2020 - Affordability
Debt Collection 2020 - Decision Optimisation
