Debt Collections Automation from A to Z in Just Several Months

Collection is a past-due debt management collection system. It covers all banking front-office workflows related to debt collection.

• Decision-making strategy development — completed
• Pre-collection stage operations — completed
• Soft-collection stage operations — completed
• Hard-collection stage operations — completed
• Collection agencies — completed
• Legal collection agencies — in progress

The customer, the owner of the Collection system, is a sizable commercial bank with a focus on lending to individuals. Therefore, debt collection management is one of the bank’s essential business operations. 

It goes without saying that the bank already had a debt-management system, but by that time it became out-dated and not reliable any longer so a quick implementation of a new system was really a mission critical requirement.

As the bank had already used FICO-based solutions with satisfying results, they chose FICO as the basic technology for the debt collection automation system to be developed and implemented by an external vendor.

Our long-term cooperation was subject to our team’s successful completion of the first project stage: Business Rules Management System (FICO Blaze Advisor) implementation. Our company was well familiar with FICO and we proved to be a reliable and qualified partner, so we were proposed to develop the whole debt management system.

Thanks to the choice of the OutSystems-based FICO Application Studio and Oracle technologies, we are able to carry out the development much quicker in comparison with custom development.

Dealing with a Mid-project Change to the Architecture

Strict deadlines were the most crucial issue during the first project stage. Simultaneously with the development of the debt management system a massive architecture overhaul was taking place and this also added complexity. For a long time, the bank had been using the software architecturally based on an enterprise service bus. Its high complexity caused overspending on the implementation and testing of every single change in the requirements. 

In the mid of the project we found out that before we integrate with the dialing system it should also be rebuilt using microservices approach, but the proposed plan required a lot of time for development and especially stabilisation and we realised that under such circumstances we won’t be able to meet deadlines.

Recognizing this major time constraint, our team suggested reusing the old code partially to save time while achieving the same outcome. As a result, we successfully repackaged the legacy backend into a microservice container and continued the project.

Integrations

The system required a string of integrations and our senior developers handled integrations expertly and completed them smoothly. These are the software and services we successfully integrated:

• Avaya Predictive Dialing System (PDS). A hardware-software solution for both inbound and outbound calls. The Avaya solution had already been in use at the bank when we started the project.
• Several Automated Banking Systems (ABS), ECM and CRM. This integration of the bank’s existing software was essential for seamless data exchange.
• Map and GIS services. This integration was vital for the hard collection phase when bank officers plan and organise meetings with the debtor personally.

Functionality 

Our Business Analysts thoroughly studied the requirements and created a SRS used further for the development.  Below are some functions used in different phases

• Customer Information File (CIF) preview. In the automatic query processing mode, the next CIF headline is displayed automatically once the processing is initialized. Users can easily search and sort CIFs using filters.
• Customer contact details editing. The bank’s staff member can update all the contact details if necessary, simply editing the appropriate field and then clicking the ‘Save’ button.
• Data input based on communication results. The results of every communication session must be reflected in the CIF. There is the special ‘Call Result’ reference form available for it. Users can access it by clicking the button of the same name.
• Communication history preview. All the communications with a certain customer are stored in the ‘Request History’ folder. This information can be sorted by the history of requests, changes, edits, and batch uploads.
• Contract data preview. In the ‘Supervisor Only’ mode, there is the possibility to preview the details of customers’ contracts. The user with the Supervisor rights can also add necessary actions for specific contracts only.
• Loan amortization schedule preview. Staff members can preview the up-to-date loan amortization schedule for every customer in the system. It contains planned and factual dates of payments, primary debt and percentage changes, and factual payments for easy comparison.
• Debt estimate. The system allows users to estimate outstanding debt for up to the next 15 days.
• Adding and activation of new services. It’s possible to add new services for the existing customer via the ‘Add a Service’ button. Some of the new services require the loan amortization schedule to be re-estimated. The decision of whether to start a new service or not is based on the selection in the ‘Result’ droplist.
• Arranging and editing of branch-based meetings. The meetings in the office can be arranged for the purpose of refinancing. All the arranged meetings can be found in the ‘Meetings’ folder. Only those meetings that are currently in the ‘Planned’ status can be edited.
• The history of adding and activating services. It is possible to view the history of added and activated services per contract. The report contains the service name, status, date of activation, and username.
• Sampling for data analysis. The ‘Supervisor Only’ mode allows users to form a fetch based on selected parameters. The list of parameters can be adjusted manually or imported into an XLSX file.
• Batch updating. The batch updating can be executed by importing the XLSX file or based on the sampling with the parameters adjusted manually.
• Mobile application for hard collection phase to organise personal meetings.
• Interactive voice responder – a complicated voice-based chat-bot able to provide different kind of information to the loan borrowers.