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Collection Agencies Shifting Strategies in Rough Economy: Survey
November 19, 2008
Collection agencies are being forced to alter the way they go after consumer payments in the current economy, even as placements are dramatically increasing, according to the results of an ARM industry confidence survey.
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More than 60 percent (61.1%) of debt collection agency respondents said that account placements were “moderately” or “significantly” higher in the third quarter of 2008. This is up from the 59.3 percent of collection agencies that answered the same way in the second quarter survey. Just 14.9 percent of survey respondents reported any type of decrease in current placements.
Collection agencies are also looking forward to even more placements over the next 12 months. For the full survey results, download the free survey report.
Collection agencies also thought highly of their current performance and the prospect of better performance going forward.
Only 19.8 percent of collection agency respondents classified their current performance as “Poor” or “Weak,” a small but noticeable increase from the 17.2 percent that answered the same way in the second quarter. On the other end of the scale, 43.1 percent said that current performance was “Strong” or “Excellent.” This represented a small decrease from the 44.9 percent of agencies that answered the same way a quarter ago.
Of all the questions on the survey, the ones predicting collection performance six months and 12 months down the road showed the largest variation between bank and creditor respondents and collection agency respondents. Banks had a much gloomier outlook on future performance compared to collection agencies. Download the full survey results to see how much they differed.
Editor’s Note: Kaulkin Ginsberg is the parent company of insideARM.com.
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Comments
Comment from Rick Wittwer on November 24, 2008 at 5:18PM EST
Lenders are under significant pressure to reduce loss rates and control the budget (that pays for outsourcing). As your article outlines, outsourcing is up. While this normally would be a good thing for agencies, lower liquidations translates into lower fee/seat.
So, lenders want increased liquidations to reduce loss rates but can't afford to pay for it. Agencies normally would welcome the additional work, but lower liquidations means little if any profit per seat.
To resolve the situation, lenders can either relax agency work standards, increase the fee paid to the agencies so that their margins return to an acceptable level, or wait for the economy to rebound. Otherwise, more agencies will fail and overall agency performance will continue to suffer.