It’s no secret that the debt collection process can be extremely time-consuming and tedious, leaving lenders’ collection teams overwhelmed as they deal with slow, drawn-out manual processes.
Making daily collection calls, sending endless reminder emails to borrowers who forgot to pay, manually matching payments to invoices, and constantly processing new information—there’s no end to the work these employees do.
That’s where MeridianLink® Collect comes in. MeridianLink Collect is debt collection software designed to help financial institutions replace tedious manual workflows with increased automation, sophisticated analytics, and easy-to-use functionality.
The Problem With Manual Debt Collection Processes
With all your other day-to-day responsibilities, managing your collection team is no easy feat. Beyond ensuring your team is keeping up with delinquencies, you also need to be aware of ever-evolving state and federal regulations.
Dealing with all this is tough enough, but it’s even more challenging if you’re running outdated collection software with manual processes. Have you ever heard the expression “behind the eight ball?” Well, that’s likely where you’ll be without debt collection software that automates key processes to benefit your institution, your team, and your consumers.
MeridianLink Collect offers new automations and checklist features to help you create seamless workflows for your collection staff to better communicate with their clients. These automations and checklists allow a customizable experience to help collectors organize their time so they can collect delinquent accounts faster. Below is a summary of these new features.
Bulk Communications
This feature allows your collection team to email and/or text multiple consumers simultaneously and set schedule when they want these messages to go out. The system comes with compliance checks that will automatically exclude borrowers who have previously opted out of receiving emails and/or text messages.
In addition, this feature will automatically log comments to applicable cases to alert debt collectors of which clients have or have not been contacted (for example, because they opted out of receiving any communications). The system also generates a communications report to help your collection team determine how much time they’ re spending on each of their accounts.
The ultimate goal of the Bulk Communications feature is to remove the need for collectors to spend hours manually sending texts or emails to debtors about their account statuses (e.g., payment reminders, payment demands, notices of insufficient funds, and more).
Doc Download
The Doc Download feature lets debt collectors create batch files of previously generated letters or have the system generate letters on demand and add those letters to their batch files. The system can send batch files of letters to client-hosted SFTP locations, drop them at a MeridianLink-hosted location for clients to pick up, or generate them as. PDF files that can be printed directly from Collect to printers on clients’ local networks. Doc Download can generate just one letter or multiple letters automatically for batching. It can also ship files to third-party print and mail vendors, which can print letters, stuff envelopes, and mail letters to debtors.
Automated Actions & Checklists
Certain tasks within collectors’ checklists can be automated so they don’t have to manually generate letters or send emails and/or texts. Rather, the system can generate specific letters as well as automatically send emails and/or texts. After the system completes the required tasks, it checks off the tasks in the collectors’ checklist.
Tasks are the individual actions that debt collectors must take on a given type of case. For example, begin outbound calls, send texts/emails, deliver specific letters or documents by a certain date, send a case to management for charge-off/repossession review, and more.
Checklists
Checklists allow clients to add tasks that collectors handle for certain types of collections accounts. Administrators create the checklists, and there’s no limit to the number they can set up. Admins can configure repossessions, foreclosures, charge-offs, bankruptcy cases, or even checklists for handling delinquencies by account type to help keep collectors on track and compliant with the policies of their financial institutions, as well as applicable state and federal regulations.
Checklists use a rules-based logic approach to determine when specific checklists apply to which cases. The system automatically attaches the checklists to the cases daily. Administrators may also configure tasks to be time sensitive. If collectors don’t finish these tasks in time, the system can notify their managers that tasks weren’t completed. Admins can also create tasks in order of importance, so collectors complete their tasks in the correct sequence.
Get Started with a Simpler Debt Collection Process
MeridianLink Collect continues to help collections teams create a customizable experience to meet the needs of their financial institutions.
Watch this recent on-demand webinar to see how MeridianLink Collect has helped FIs improve their collection strategy as delinquency rates increase.
