Interview: Bud Reitzel, Founder of Asset Acceptance

A. I have always been in the finance and collection business. While attending college in the '50s, I worked for Seaboard Finance Co., then one of the largest consumer loan companies in the country. I became hooked on the industry and it's been in my blood ever since. Moving into the collection business was a natural offshoot.

A. Compared to the industry now, it was very unsophisticated - there were no large call center operations like today. It was very time intensive - much more difficult in terms of managing data and making actual collections. Also, it was much more difficult to secure financing for portfolio purchases. Very few investors wanted to loan money to companies that purchased charged-off consumer receivables. Their thought was, if the credit originators can't collect on the charge-offs, how are you going to? We needed to show a long track record of profitable returns to prove to investors that we could succeed in recovering charged-off consumer debt.

A. For the people we could not contact by phone, we literally went door-to-door to make collections. In those days, each collector was responsible for approximately 350 accounts in their route. Collections were very labor intensive. Now, with the introduction of computers, each collector has 4000 to 5000 accounts in their route.

A. That was not always the case. At one time, we owned a collection agency division and a debt purchasing division. We sold the collection agency division in the mid 1970s to focus on purchasing debt.