It's not often I do this, but today, I’m going to highlight one of the secrets of our success.
Whether you want to call this a secret, or just common sense, is ultimately up to you, however.
Before building any new solution, we do a huge amount of work behind the scenes on mapping out market fit, speaking to customers, prospective customers, partners and stakeholders to refine our thinking.
Then, as we build new products, this conversation continues to ensure that before market launch, it covers absolutely everything that we have spoken about – in some case for well over a year.
That reflects the process that we have just been through in the launch of our new Collections & Recoveries solution.
Atto is well established in the process of customer onboarding. From verifying income and accounts, identifying customers and overcoming challenges related to AML and KYC, our platform facilitates thousands of account openings a year for some of the biggest lenders on the globe.
What our customers and stakeholders told us was that they required at something at the other end of the customer journey. Where loans and credit have been offered and not repaid is a whole industry that can be defined as being awkward, inefficient and time consumptive.
We therefore established very quickly that the collections and recoveries industry was susceptible to the use of bank data, in the same way that we found with customer onboarding years ago.
We are now delighted to bring to market our new Collections & Recoveries solution. We already know from conversations that this will be of particular interest to organisations from across sector, but especially banks, non-banking lenders, government bodies and charities working in debt assistance, as well as any other company that offers credit or finance for purchases such as home improvements or cars.
Introducing Collections & Recoveries from Atto.
What's the problem?
Collections and recoveries in the UK is currently particularly inefficient for agents, and can be distressing for consumers.
Working with some of the UK’s leading banks, lenders and debt collections agencies, Atto has built a solution that will simplify and streamline the collections process for both collections' agents and their customers.
Using bank data, collections agents will have an up-to-date and accurate view of customer’s financial statement and an assessment on their disposable income, and thus, how much they can afford to repay.
Our Collections & Recoveries product combines Atto’s categorisation engine with the categories defined within the Standard Financial Statement.
For individuals, who have built up large amounts of debt, it removes a lot of the stress and uncertainty. The use of bank data negates the need for them to supply lots of details around financial commitments with existing creditors.
Currently, collections agents can spend a large volume of time with a customer assessing how much income they have, and what their discretionary and non-discretionary spend looks like. This process is also prone to customer error, downplay spend, or deliberately mislead, in an attempt to keep repayments low.
How does it work?
Atto’s product circumvents the often unpleasant collections process from a period of weeks to just minutes.
Collections & Recoveries uses an individual’s bank data to help lenders streamline the collections process. This supplies the lender with an up-to-date and accurate view of an individual’s debt commitments and subsequently their capacity to repay debt.
Atto’s Collections & Recoveries solution identifies income streams; expenditure; insight into a customer’s profile; including discretionary and non-discretionary; and summarises payments to lenders.
Standard Financial Statement
The Standard Financial Statement (SFS) is a landmark development for debt advice in the UK which delivers, for the first time, a universal income and expenditure statement, together with a single set of spending guidelines.
We categorise our data alongside the categories featured in the SFS, meaning that our Collections & Recoveries solution is compatible with SFS. This is important because the SFS has been developed to provide a single format for financial statements. This makes it easier for creditors and debtors to work together and come to a solution over debt management.
Overcoming market challenges
The new Collections & Recoveries solution from Atto overcomes many of the challenges currently experienced within the market. With no data asserted by the customer, agents are granted compete and factual view of the customer’s financial situation – with no reliance on customer’s to provide information which can be exaggerated or potentially untruthful.
In the traditional scenario there is potential scope for delays while loans and debts on credit reports are investigated. With Atto, all loans, along with all other expenditure (both discretionary and non-discretionary) are understood immediately within the context of the customer’s bank statement information.
Finally, with no paperwork or bank statements to pore over, there are significant savings to be made in time and effort for collections agents.
Fin
Atto’s new Collections & Recoveries product offers significant enhancements over current outdated, manual and time-consumptive processes.
It also offers a far simpler and less stressful experience for the consumer, for whom, being in a position of having to repay a debt, can be particularly upsetting.
Without the need to go over every line of their monthly spend, and presented with how much disposable income they have at the end of each month, it is far simpler for consumers to agree a repayment figure that they know they can afford and won’t cause undue distress, while also being realistic.
By using bank data, allied with the Standard Financial Statement, Atto’s solution is applicable across different industries and sector. With debt and particularly bad debt books an ever-increasing burden for many companies, we know that there will be many businesses that can benefit from the power of bank data.
