Business Intelligence Can Help Collectors' ROI

By adding business intelligence to their search methods, collections firms can greatly reduce their expenses while maintaining the same level of collections, according to Intellidyn president and CEO Peter Harvey. Intellidyn, based in Hingham, Mass, provides data management, analytic services, list services, database marketing and strategic services to the financial services industry.

“This is an industry which provides a very labor intensive type of service,” Harvey said. “The skip tracer gets a list of names, then he starts calling everyone on the list. Now, with the Internet, he’ll do the searches by starting to look up the information. Those two areas of expense have been the most intensive and have been linear – the more names, the higher the expense.”

As the use of the Internet has become more prevalent, the challenge has become more daunting, according to Harvey. Rather than coming up with one or two John Smiths, the collector will typically find several duplicate names through a search service – paying for each name – along with a lot of other information that doesn’t provide any more help in successfully collecting the debt but that he still must sort through.

A better method, according to Harvey, is to work with business intelligence that ranks the probability that a debtor will pay. That way the collection firm will spend much less time and effort to get the same results.

Rather than spending time searching for information on each individual debtor, the collection firm can search for all pertinent debtor information (name, address, phone, place of employment, next of kin, etc.) in a batch mode, so that all of the data is available at one time. This way automation efficiently eliminates the time spent getting all information for the first person on the list, then for the second, then for the third, and so on.

“This enables you to start calling on the list more efficiently,” Harvey explains. Also adding to the efficiency is using the same type of business intelligence modeling that marketers have used for several years. Intellidyn, for example, ranks debtors in three categories – the most likely to be contacted, the most likely to pay and the highest amount to be collected. From those rankings, collection firms can better prioritize the debtors to contact, according to Harvey.