Mastering Your Collections

Introduction and Agenda Overview   

Joseph Mearrn 

00:37 – 15:26 

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. 

My name is Joe Mearn, and I am director of product management here at MeridianLink. And I’m joined by my colleague, John Cosgrove, who is a product owner here at MeridianLink. 

Both of us work in the Meridian Collections line of business. And we’re here today to talk about mastering your collections. 

Just a reminder here that any information, in this presentation that may contain any forward looking statements, predictions, expectations, any forecasting, may differ from actual events. Alright. 

So, for today’s agenda, we’re going to cover first some industry and technology trends within the collections industry. We’re going to talk about challenges that we see in the collections processes and how some of those solutions that we have may support any of those challenges that we see. 

John’s going to come and give you a high level demo of the Meridian Link Collect product. And then we’re going to cover what’s next and coming soon. 

And then we’ll close with some information that we’re going to provide to you today on the Meridian Link Live 2024. Session. 

Industry and Technology Trends 

Okay. So, as you’re probably well aware, financial institutions are you know, contend with increased delinquency volume today due to rate hikes, struggle with repayments, and they’re struggling to find new innovative and tailored solutions to really help guide their consumers through these troubling times. 

We see vehicle loan delinquencies are at a peak, credit card debt is, you know, just over a 1,000,000,000,000, mortgage rates are at an all-time high and student loans continue to cause financial strain on your consumers. This trend of increase in delinquencies also comes with regulatory pressures challenges with staffing, all while the industry as a whole is going through a digital transformation. 

These industry trends, they’re leading to, you know, new financial conditions and challenges, and it’s not a one size fits all solution. So, to truly support consumers on their unique financial journey, FIs need to showcase their adaptability with their plans so that they can cater towards these individual circumstances. 

Financial institutions are going to need to lean on data technology and partnerships, to support them moving forward. So, looking at what we see from a technology perspective, As the industry trends in these directions, the technology to support collections must adapt, to these needs. 

One trend that we’re starting to see in the collections line of businesses, technologies move into more intelligent solutions that are leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data optimization, allowing for collectors to focus on the right cases at the right time. Technology must also keep up with the regulatory changes to provide collectors and auditors with the technological tools or tracking, audit in, and reporting all while maintaining compliance. 

Communication is also changing, and technology needs to keep up with those consumer expectations where nowadays, consumers expect a tailored and personalized experience when it comes to how their financial institution communicates with them. So, technology needs to meet these expectations. 

They need to know the right method, for the right person as far as communication goes. We need to start to move into the digital trends to SMS and email over direct mail and call in and then lastly, look at things around collections marketing to make sure that they’re the first to get paid when a consumer does fall into debt. 

Lastly, as we see staffing issues within collection teams, the technology needs to provide optimization and automation and guidance so that, collector’s efforts are efficient and compliant. So, what are our customers telling us that they’re seeing as challenges out there? First, it’s with Management of their existing platforms. 

Right? There are too much configuration and administration that takes place within the existing use case. They had spent too much time focusing on new releases and upgrades, and it becomes a strain on their IT resources in order to keep up with the management of the platform. 

There’s also a need for improvement in efficiency. There are too many manual processes. 

There are not enough integrations to 3rd party software and services. There’s lack of automation and workflows. 

And it’s challenging for the employees to really learn and train on the systems, plus get a good understanding of the data within. Support also continues to be an issue where frontline staff aren’t able to get the additional support needed, through longer wait times. 

And then compliance overlays all of this while there continues to be an increase in audit and find activity, you know, we’re forced down more regulations to really support the financial institution today. So, what are some of those solutions, that can help with these challenges First, we can look at, you know, SAS cloud based technology that allows users to focus on delinquent accounts rather than maintaining the back end technology and updates the system. 

FIs need to leverage the wealth of consumer data at their disposal to make well informed decisions that really keep the best interest of their institution and consumers top of mind. If an individual’s drawn in in debt, perhaps maybe a goodwill plan or a workout loan that really eliminates some of those interest charges and really empowers the borrower to make those direct principal payments might be the best option. 

Looking to leverage modern intuitive technology that really drives the ease of use for support, hiring, and staffing challenges, all while improving the, you know, workflow automations and efficiencies is another way that we can attack this solution. Continuing with kind of the support and services model, finding an offer out there today that can really support your frontline. 

And then look into partnerships. Right? The importance of partnerships is that financial institutions should really have a strategy in place where they seek different fintech collaborations for support of this digital transformation. 

These collaborations could be dependent upon the financial institution’s needs and objectives and can really be broken into 3 different categories focusing on 1st operational technologies Second would be consumer oriented technology, and third would be, you know, front end fintech, all providing different solutions to help support these financial institutions during these challenging times. So, I want to talk a little bit how MeridianLink Collect today is a solution for collectors, and really focusing on, 4 different areas that Once we get into the demo, we’ll be able to show you a little bit more. 

But the first is, you know, 1st party data. Data is king, and that is going to be how You know, we are able to drive the platform by leveraging core and payment data, as well as all of the data that sits within the, written link 1 ecosystem, including direct data from the application, credit data, and analytics. 

3rd party data is going to become important with, you know, multiple in platform third party integrations. Where we can support collectors, with additional ease of use through multiple integrations to stay within a single platform to improve the operational efficiencies. 

Going talk a little bit more about workflows and, how, you know, customization of these workflows that, you know, collectors can set up through checklists, automations, reports that are really going to fit the need of that financial institution and, you know, come up with different types of multichannel communications to really reduce any process heavy activities that might exist today. And then lastly, this is all going to be done through a lens of sec security and compliance. 

Where there’s built in functionality to really help users stay compliant and set up those custom internal workflows that are going to support the staff and their policies and procedures. Okay. 

So, talking a little bit more about that 1st party data in in internal, integrations is MeridianLink Collect. It’s one platform product that sits with the Meridian Lake One ecosystem. 

Currently today, we are integrated to Meridian Link Consumers. So, we have that direct integration from the cases within collect to the application history of the consumer product. 

We also have the direct integration into MeridianLink Insight, our BI platform, where we can set up all types of different collect analytic dashboards to help you with your decision in process. You know, overall, the Meridian Link 1 platform, it’s a, set of innovative products that really covers the entire digital lending journey from deposit account opening, consumer and mortgage loan opening, credit reporting, data access, business consultant, analytics, scoring, and, obviously, collections. 

And you know, with that 1st party data, you know, it needs to be relevant, towards your consumers in the relationships that we have. So, you get a full, perspective of that consumer view, what products and solutions they have, so that you have all of that data at your fingertips to give you a 360 degree view to help you make the right decisions within your case resolution. 

Custom files are another 1st party data. The feature that’s very important because It allows you to bring in an augment to your core payments and meridian link data, certain unique fields that are relevant to your financial institution that’s going to help you to be able to apply them towards, again, resolution, reporting, and automations. 

Next step is a, external integrations that we have. So we have over, you know, 23rd party integration So I’m not going to go into depth on each one of these, but, you know, we cover anywhere from, payments to identity reporting, skip tracing, repossession, government reporting, 3rd party collections, you know, capturing eSignatures, and then communications for SMS mail in, compliance and a lot more. 

And these are all seamless integrations, with many partners that keep your collectors within the platform so that we’re not bouncing from system to system. And, again, following that data strategy to get you more data more reliable data so that you can continue to properly, work these cases as they come in. 

Workflows. So, collect is an it’s a simple, efficient, compliant platform really allowing for your financial institution to, customize the platform to meet your needs, with challenges in hiring as we saw, trying to retain collectors. 

We believe there’s a lot of value in having a platform that is simple and easy to use to really help again solve for those staffing problems, but, you know, increase the efficiencies that we see within the industry today. You have the ability to create checklist, guide your collections teams, through your compliance policies, you know, customize the system, with your system admins or, you know, collection managers, where you can create tasks and queues and really list out the steps needed, to work an account in a particular queue apply filter in for different types of case strategies, and reduce those manual activities. 

Our queue engine is really a robust queue engine that allows you to build different types of rules that are again going to meet your needs and help support you in your collection strategy. Support you in a compliance perspective, and then omnichannel communication. 

So, through email, phone, SMS, text messaging, this can all be done at the individual entity level or through different types of bulk sends, that can be templated as well. So, we can do behavioral outreach. 

And all of the communication within the platform is going to be tracked and audited. You know, integrations to skip tracing where we can improve efficiency and productivity, reporting. 

So, there’s lots of reporting that can be preconfigured as well as custom reporting. That’s going to give you more analytics into your portfolio. 

And then lastly, kind of close with document support so we can map documents into the platform so they’re readily available within each one of the cases created in the platform. And before we jump into the demo just want to talk a little bit about compliance, where, you know, collect, you know, main goal wants to keep our financial institutions compliant. 

We have certain features that support, you know, FDCPA and the TCPA where it limits collectors to the 7 on 7 rule. You know, we track and manage any opt outs through email, phone, SMS. 

We do work, place, email validation, we continue to run our system through, vulnerability management. We do annual pen testing. 

We have the appropriate business continuity plans, vendor management, integrations with MLA verify for any, you know, active duty military and also, you know, different types of risk management there. So, I’m now going to stop sharing, and I’m going to hand the webinar over to John for his demo. 

Demo of Meridian Link Collect 

John Cosgrove 

15:26 – 34:06 

Thank you, Joe, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is John Cosgrove. 

I’m product owner from Redeem Lake Collect. And as Joe said, just a moment ago, I will be you through a quick demonstration of Meridian Lake Collect and everything that we have to offer in terms of the integrations, workflow, customization and compliance that he mentioned just a moment ago. 

So, with that being said, I’m going to pull up Renee link collect here for you to view. And take you through, a repo work case because that is becoming quieter, more common these days. 

So essentially, what users typically will do is configure queues based on their unique business needs. And then what Colette can help do is route cases to these various queues based on information that you’re sending in. 

Additionally, you can use custom fields to help your collectors recommend cases for charge off or recommend cases for in this instance repossessions. So, I might have a vehicle loan that looks like it’s delinquent and possibly heading down the path of a repossession. 

And with custom fields, I can essentially tell my collector if you see any case is that look like a potential repos, send them to me for review so that I could sign off on it actually being in a repossession and we can con we could facilitate the repo order from directly from within collect. So, the way that would work is as a collector, I would get into a given queue. 

Depending on how my queues are set up, I would basically filter for auto loans. So maybe you might already have auto loan queue set up, which we can also support. 

But in this case, I just have a general queue set up for testing purposes. And here, what I’m doing is filtering by product type, and delinquency range. 

So, in this case, I’m going to pull up a number of accounts that are basically vehicle loans that are between 6089 DPD. So, I’m just going to select this account here, this test member. 

And as you can see, here’s our vehicle loan. And as you could also see, we’re at 61 DPD, not necessarily a refund, for some folks, but let’s just consider this one as such. 

Now the beauty of custom fields is you have the ability to capture data above and beyond what collect offers statically were out of the box. As you can see, we have a number of data points available here for you to be able to map data in from your core banking system by which we support all courses currently out in the industry. 

So with that being said, for example, if I want to capture additional collateral tales that I house within the core, but not in collect because I don’t have anything other than the ability to map in VIN year, make, and model, maybe I need to capture some additional information. So, as you can see, what I’ve done is I’ve set up custom fields to allow me to be able to have my collectors choose selections that I’ve configured as an admin. 

So, in this particular case, perhaps the vehicle auto color is black. Maybe the package is an executive pack Maybe the powertrain is that it’s four wheel drive. 

Maybe the transmission is automatic. I can even map in a first payment date if I’m looking to track my first payment defaults. 

I could also map in if there’s gap or not. In this particular case, I’ll just map in yes. 

And then I could even map in origination details if I choose to do that. The bottom line is that with custom fields, you’ll get up to close to a 160 I’m sorry, a 140 fields, a 100 for loan, 20 for member specific information, 24, savings or deposit account information. 

Most of these fields are obviously related to loans. So, what I’ve done is I’ve set up my custom fields that are related to auto loans to be only available for my auto loans. 

So that if I were to get into a mortgage or credit card. I would not see these. 

I could have other custom fields, perhaps, for mortgages or for my FCCs. But in this case, I want to show how you can actually route this over to a queue so that it will actually be reviewed by a manager. 

So, what I’ll do here is just basically select yes. I do recommend this as a repo. 

Maybe I’ve tried to call this number over and over or customer, depending on if you’re a credit union bank over and over and over again. I’m not having any I’m not having any contact. 

I’m not getting any correspondence. We’re not making any headway. 

So, you know, I’ve done my part as a collector, so now it’s time for me to recommend for repo. What I’ll do is save that data. 

Now what’s going to happen is you could basically create a queue to look at this rule to drive this case to the queue based on what the user selects here, or the collector selects. So, if the collector says yes, what we could do is we could basically route it to a recommend for repo queue. 

And from there, what could happen is a manager could get into the case that could review the account details and then officially move it to a repo queue. So, I’m going to show you what it looks like and how you can leverage a lot of the integrations and, and everything that Joe mentioned, the goal is to keep the collector inside of collect as much as possible. 

So, in this particular case with repos, I’m going to go on down to the repossession queue. These are accounts that have been signed off on by a manager. 

The manager will have the ability through them feel to say, yes. I do recommend it or not. 

I don’t recommend repo. If yes, we will move it to the queue. 

And then basically allow the collector or whoever’s managing these accounts to continue on in a repo process. So, as you can see here, let me just go ahead open up my out for repo or, I’m sorry, my repossession queue. 

Total of 4 accounts. So, I’m going to pick Mister Turnpeak down here as my, account to view. 

So, in this case, severely delinquent, obviously, the goal is to maybe in this particular instance, find out what steps I need to take to be able to get in front of Mr. Turnpeak one time before invoking any type of a formal repo request. 

Now one thing that I want to point out is that we have the ability to do what’s called feature stacking. So not only can you use custom fields to drive cases to and from queues for management approval or review and then have those approved and moved to a subsequent queue for processing, you could also tie in additional features to take things to the next level with collect and to optimize all the function that we offer in terms of automation, integrations, and so on and so forth. 

So, the first thing that I would do is check this checklist tab. And here, as you could see, we have account info, or we have tasks that are specific to repo that I’ve set up as an admin to display. 

So, any repo case that I get into, I will have tasks assigned to me as a collector to be able to execute upon. So, depending on which collector is working the account, the very step here would be to review the account history, go through the notes. 

Where was this account last? When was the last point of contact made, so on and so forth? And then kind of work down the list. So what I’m going to do in this particular case is I’m going to show you how we can use some technology to be able to have outreach to this member because perhaps maybe before I actually order a repo or start that process, I want to give this member or customer one last chance to respond to my request that maybe we could do a workout loan or something along those lines and save that individual from actual repo. 

So, in this particular case, I’m going to go ahead and execute a text message. I’m going to go ahead and launch. 

And what I’m showing right here is our Ultrapro integration. As you can see, I have previous text messages to and from this cell phone number for Mister Turnkey. 

What I’m going to do in this particular case is I’m going to use a quick response, and these are going to basically be templates that you configure as an admin in the entropy portal that will be exposed for your collectors to choose from as they’re going through their workflow. So, I’m going to click on this payment demand. 

And as you can see here, I want to go ahead and send pre-formatted text message over to Mr. Turnpeak. 

Right? So, I’m going to go ahead and send that text message. And so, Mr. Turnpeak will receive this on his cell phone, and he’ll have the ability to respond. Now if he does respond, I’ll get a notification, an alert basically to display here and collect to tell me that there was an incoming text message. 

And when I actually go to the drawer and I see that message displayed, I would click on the cell phone number, which would launch the Ultrapro application, and I could see that inbound text message and reply. But in this case, being that he’s severely delinquent chances are, he’s probably not going to respond to my text message. 

Right? So maybe I want to send an email. So, sending an email on Select is also something very simple to do. 

All that I have to do is basically click on the past due payment notification template. As you can see here, we populate in some information that you have the ability as an admin to set mappings to So in this particular case, I have mapped in an account number and some details about the, you know, the transaction. 

And then I also have my signature and my logo all so mapped in all of the email correspondence that I choose to send out. So, a nice touch shows a nice professional, you know, reputable person is sending me an email. 

So, in this case, I’ll click send. And now if you notice, we have a compliance feature built in because the domain that’s associated with Mr. 

Turnpeak is my actual Meridian link email address, right? So, a company email address and like most out there, you would want to avoid sending any type of collections related communication to somebody’s workplace email address, right? There are regulations around that. So, in collect, we have the ability to set up a feature to basically screen for domains that aren’t commonly used republic domains, such as a Gmail, or a Yahoo or an iCloud. 

If I see something like meridianlink.com as Meridianlink Collect software, we’re going to flag that account and give the collector a prompt to say, are you sure you want to send us email? Now we don’t block the email from being sent because there could have been previous consent from the, the, the member or customer saying, I’m okay with you. 

I’m self-employed. I’m okay with you sending me email because I live on my work email address as a self-employed, you know, borrower. 

So please send me the email. So, again, we don’t block that. 

Now we do have ways to opt out the email address, and I’ll show you that here in a second, but I’m going to go ahead and proceed because I’ve received consent. So, in this case, the email has been sent. 

Now if for whatever reason, Mr. Turnpeak basically says, hey, I don’t want any more course respondents at this email address, I just simply set this flag here and set it to opt out. 

And as you can see here, we highlight the field red to let the collector know, avoid sending any email communication from here. And we also note that down here. 

Another nice thing to just quickly point out regarding my email outreach is that we log the entire content of the email here in our notes. So, it makes it very easy for anybody that’s doing auditing to review communication. 

And if I’m only looking for email, I could use this filter here to just show me all of my email correspondence. You could even export out the comments if you’d like to do some internal auditing. 

So, there’s many, many nice little tiny features about collect that can add up and give you a more powerful experience. So again, Let’s say that was a checklist task. 

I would go in. I would basically check that task as such and basically move it into a completed status, right, and so, essentially, what’s going to happen is that thing gets moved over to, complete status, and I would move on to the next task. 

Now let’s say, for example, you know, the next task is to complete some information related to what’s happening with the repo through a custom field. Again, I would have those fields available for me to input any data that may need to be captured outside of what I might normally capture in in the core, such as any other information related to the repo effort and so on and so forth. 

And then finally, you know, we do have tools to allow for skip tracing with many different vendors, Lexus, nexus, and Experian are 2 that we show here. We also work with Innovus, and we’re currently building out more functionality with various other skip tracing vendors as well. 

To show you how easy it is, in the case of Lexus Nexus, I would just simply select a report and then I would basically order that report. And then whatever is basically returned to me, I would have the opportunity to view that report in a webpage that would allow me to kind of look at the data act on the data based on what’s been returned. 

So, we even have integrations into all these other different third party integrations to be able to keep your collector inside of collect. Let’s say maybe even wanting to check for a bankruptcy, right? I have the ability to go into Pacer. 

And do my searches directly through collect. So in this case, if I search by party, we’ll go ahead and make this call to Pacer without having to log you in, return the results, and then I could import that bankruptcy information into Meridian Lake Collect, and that’ll let me know if there’s a potential chapter 13 or not. 

And if you notice in this case, with the test account that I’ve picked up and, and imported into collect, we have a banner that’s being displayed to let you know that might be a potential chapter 13. We say potential because in the response from Pacer for that individual, they provided to us a file date, but not a charge or dismissed date. 

So, in theory, that case could still be open, right? That bankruptcy could still be open. And so, we flagged the case that the collector can do a little bit more due diligence before maybe proceeding with any type of repo activity. 

So, let’s say, for example, this person is not in any kind of a bankruptcy. I’ve done all of my checks through the system. 

I’ve done some skipping. I’ve tried some additional numbers. 

I’ve text I’ve done everything that I possibly can. The last step is ordering the repo. 

Right? So, with Collect, we have an integration currently with strategic marketing solutions. And we have a few others underway with, additional vendors that could provide the similar, similar, services. 

So, in this case, with a repo integration, what this allows you to do is to be able to execute that repo, request directly to a national vendor who will then work with a local agent probably one that you’re already working with in your current network of repo vendors. So, they do the dirty work. 

They basically do the, assignment to the repo agent. The repo agent does all of the communication back and forth between the national vendor and the national vendor will then update their portal, which you’ll have access to and collect. 

So, it’s a nice seamless integration to be able to get that request going because in talking to a lot of clients, many do this externally. And one of the apps is I would love to be able to have all of this done through the system. 

So in this case, with SRS, you just basically select the type of effort you select whether or not you think the car needs to be voluntary or involuntarily repossessed or if it’s impounded, maybe, maybe it’s a remarketing only deal, in which case I would set this to remarketing. But let’s just say that it’s a voluntary repossession. 

The members of our customer are going to turn that into the credit union or bank. And as you can see, we have filled in a lot of this information already. 

So, I literally selected 3 fields. I also have to specify the vehicle type in the case of their integration, which would be auto. 

And with those 3 fields, I will click create case. And what’s going to happen is that it goes over to SRS. 

They receive the request. They receive all of the contact information. 

And demographic information on the applicant and maybe a co applicant or joint if there’s one associated with the loan, and then they go to work. They’ll work with 1 of the vendors that you guys have agreed to, work with between the vendor and yourselves. 

And then that vendor will receive the order from SRS and then act on using the information provided from collect. Now as things progress through that recovery effort, let’s say that the vendor is actually out for repo, you know, trying to locate the collateral, that status will basically be fed back to the SRS portal. 

And once I actually create the case, what’s going to happen is there will be a view case button here to which when I click view, it’s going to launch collateral page so that I don’t even have to search in the SRS portal. When I click view, it redirects me to that exact piece of collateral and all of the details around it. 

In that, I’ll be able to see all of the case activity and the note activity. I can even chime in as a collector. 

Maybe I’ve done skip, or maybe I’ve worked with our CARFAX integration. We have a great CARFAX integration where we could even do a recent activity lookup, which is basically the service records that are associated with the vehicle. 

So you could potentially have somebody that skipped town, and they’re in a different area, and they’re getting an oil changer tune up and using this recent activity file, CARFAX will basically return to you all of the recent activity along with where that vehicle could potentially be located so that you could redirect the repo agent to that area. Right? And that’s not uncommon. 

That happens frequently. So, this is another way to skip tracing using one of our, our nice integrations here. 

But at the end of the day, the collector could plug that information into the SRS portal and say, hey, repo vendor, please look over in this city or in this location. I’m getting some additional information, and it might be helpful. 

And that way, you’re communicating directly with the repo, agent, through the vendor’s tools. And all of this is tracked. 

So, you have a lot of different tools at your disposal when it comes to integrations here in Collect. As I’ve shown texting, skip tracing, ordering your repos, Pacer, we could do MLA lookups. 

Maybe this is a duty service member. And before I do any type of rec repo activity, I need to confirm for sure that Mister Turnpeak is actually enlisted and currently considered active duty because if that’s the case for SCRA reasons, I would want to hold off on any repo activity, right? So, you could do your check here. 

You could click order MLA. And what’s going to happen is a request will be made, and it’ll either tell me, yes, their active duty or not. 

Activity. And this information is coming directly from Experian who has a tie in to the Department of Defense’s database, as you guys may know. 

So, the information is valid in terms of safe harbor for compliance with SCRA. But at the end of the day, you’re getting even statuses. 

You don’t need log in to the DOD portal, DMV portal, if you have to look up that that bit of information to kind of help you with your repos. Lastly, there’s a lot of different tools available in the way of repos. 

And I’m not going to go into that because if anybody’s interested in reporting, we have a very, very robust reporting package. We’re happy to do some demonstrations of collect to be able to show you a little bit more about some of the additional functionality. 

Truthfully, if we were to cover reporting, it would take the entire time of this demo. We have a very robust, you know, tool for reports. 

And with that, you could basically report against all of your repo and remarketing activity, even using custom field data. Right? Maybe some of this data is important to my stakeholders there at the FI. 

When I show them what’s happening with my repo activity, but maybe some of the details that I’ve captured along the way as a part of custom field creation and user input, I need to have in reports. So custom fields aren’t necessarily just used to capture data and display it, but we can use it for queuing, as you saw with workflows, and we could also use it for your reports so that you could create really robust reports for your, repo, recovery remarketing efforts. 

So, I believe that I’ve really touched on quite a bit in a short amount of time. I’m always happy to talk a lot about collecting and showing more. 

So, if anybody’s did in any additional information about Collect, please reach out to Amanda, and we’ll be happy to set something up through you guys. But with that being said, I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing, and I’m going to turn that back over to Joe. 

What’s Next for MeridianLink Collect   

Joseph Mearn 

34:06 – 40:10 

Thanks, John. Great demo. 

Really good insight into the solutions that Meridian Collect has to, you know, support what we see happening out there in the, industry as far as trends go as well as some of the challenges that we see. So, thank you again. 

I really appreciate that demo. Kinda close here. 

We want to talk about what’s next with Meridian Link. Collect. 

As you can see, there’s a lot of good functionality in the platform today, and we continue to evolve that, to meet our customer and our market needs up first, I want to talk a little bit about our new API that’s in development, that is going to help improve our connectivity with core in partner integrations, through different endpoints that are going to allow for real time data transfer and get additional data into the system. Knowing that it’s very important for you to have that right data in it to be accurate to work that case. 

We have new rest APIs that are going to support post get and delete functions across the different attributes that we have within the collect schema. And along with that, we’ll become a swagger tool for testing. 

I’m very excited to get that API out to market. Next up is going to be our collection analytics module. 

So, to enhance the, Actionable analytics that we have, we want to tap into a little bit more of the marooning link 1 platform to help with those intelligent collection decision making. So, within the Meridian Link Insight platform, we’ve developed new dashboards, for collect customers that can report on cases, debt or demographics, performance, promises to pay, and really support different use cases in, you know, who’s taken promises, who’s collecting on them. 

How long have cases been worked? What is the different and rate outstanding debt, and really provide you with the analytics that you can pull back into, redeeming collect to do your cure on these cases as they come in. Another item that we’re pretty excited about that comes with this is a propensity score where we can look at those cases that are in early delinquency and what is the likelihood of them to care on their own. 

Again, that can be used to, you know, route cases to certain queues. Up next is going to be our enhancement to add an additional data to support foreclosure. 

So, you know, we want to have that robust solution as we want to keep those collectors within the platform and not have to leave to go get that foreclosure data elsewhere. So, we’ll have new tabs and sections within the collection product that is going to allow for the, data to be pulled in, and we’ll be able to now report on, different legal appraisal titles, tax insurance and mortgage data within the collection platform. 

And then kind of staying on par here with the with the data story is we want to continue to grow our 3rd party data integrations. And we’re doing so with new enhancements to our identity and reporting functionality with, the Transunion TLO function. 

As John showed you, we just recently brought out the Ultrapro integration for SMS texting. We work with PSCU for 3rd party collections, and we continue to add to our repossession integrations with SWBC. 

Lastly, we Always are evaluating the new payment providers, that are available for us, and we’ll be looking into integrations with Alacrity OrbiPay and message pay. Alright. 

Real quick, I want to tell you about a couple of success stories from 2 existing customers. On average, you know, our collect customers tend to see a you know, just over 6% reduction in delinquencies and overall cost savings while using the Meridian platform, in the first success story here is is Franklin Mint Credit Union who, was able to grow their portfolio by 40% and they attribute that growth, with the addition of the collect platform to their portfolio where they believe they were allowed to write more loans with the confidence that it can manage any addition in delinquencies if that does become applicable with the existing stack that they have in place due to the functionality of the Meridian Collect product. 

The next story here is South Point Federal Credit Union who is a two person collector shop that leverages the flexibility and the custom cues, and the custom report into optimize their collections line of business. And, they’ve seen, as many have, a higher increase in the volume of delinquencies, but with that two person collector shop, they’re still able to, maintain their existing staffing and continue to meet, the needs of the financial institution and, you know, continue to meet the needs of their compliance. 

So, 2 good success stories there. Okay. 

Before we go into our q and a portion, we are going to have a couple of polls that we’re going to launch. For you. 

So, we’ll launch those polls, and then we’ll get into our Q and a session. 

Q&A Session 

Joseph Mearn 

40:10 – 42:19 

What types of challenges does your financial institution face when it comes to collections today? We’ll give you a couple seconds to answer that one. And then the kind of next question is, you know, would you like a more in-depth look at the Meridian Collect platform? And its capabilities. 

If so, you can answer that question, and we can be in contact with you as well. And the second call should be open now. Alright. Polls will remain open, so feel free to go back. 

But right now, we’ll jump into q and there are a couple of questions out there. The first one is around customs queues and rules asking. 

Can you provide an example of how I could customize all the queues? I can start with this 1 and then John, you can jump in. 

All of the queues that are in the system. Will be part of your onboarding process. 

So as a financial institution goes through the implementation phase, They’ll work with an implementation manager and a collect product team to build their custom queues, you know, inject in theory in general here, all of the data that comes into the collect platform can be used in our rules engine. We can do, you know, different types of statements, and or nested queries within this rule. 

We can use failed such as you know, account types, account status, product codes, warning codes, amounts, dates, and all of that to build into the rules engine. Again, it’s going to be based off of how you currently work your, collections processes today or, you know, maybe some efficiencies and enhancements that you would like to make as well. 

And, John, I don’t know if you want to add anything to that, in the queue. 

John Cosgrove 

42:19 – 43:15 

lot of our clients guys tend to also have queues set up to avoid any type of potential compliance risk. So they will want to mitigate the exposure of any type of compliance violations or, policy or procedural guidelines and, and violation of those, such as making sure that you have set up to route your bankruptcies too so that your team is not doing live dials on those bankruptcy accounts. 

For SCRA, we can create an SCRA Q. And based on those active duty military checks that are done through our integration with MLA verify, we can route those that are active duty to an SCRA and so on and so forth. 

So, we can certainly also not just build out queues to capture delinquencies as well as current loan, shares, deposit accounts, etcetera, but we could also create queues to help mitigate that compliance risk and minimize your exposure to any type of, compliance violation. 

Joseph Mearn 

43:15 – 44:16 

Great. Thanks, John. 

Second question I see there is can I buy, collect itself, or do I need other products within Meridian Link in order for it to, function properly? So, collect can function as a standalone system. It does not require you to have an existing relationship with Meridian Link and any of the other products. 

With that being said, we demoed and we talked about, there are some additional advantages with the collect platform and the integration that it does have to Meridian and Consumer for application history views as well as Meridian and Collect for the additional insights, analytics, and score and models that we’ve currently built there. But yes, in short, it can function as a standalone platform. 

Kind of another question out there. And, John, this one might be a good one for you. 

Is there an easy way of transferring existing notes and data over, or would it be a manual process? 

John Cosgrove 

44:16 – 44:59 

We can work with our clients on boarding over notes from an existing collection software offering that you might be using. We’ve done it before with others, so it definitely wouldn’t be something that, would be any type of a challenge for us. 

It just depends on the type of information that’s being extracted and then ensuring that we can associate the account or at least a comment related to the account from the previous software offering to the account immediately collect. But we this is actually pretty standard. 

As we have a lot of clients that have recently migrated over from a number of different collection platforms to MeridianLink Collect. So, this is something that we can definitely support. 

Joseph Mearn 

44:59 – 45:13 

Great. Thanks, Sean. 

And I see another question out here. This one is around, core support, really. 

What Kors does collect support. And maybe, John, you can talk a little bit about that and just kind of the data integration in general. 

John Cosgrove 

45:13 – 46:14 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Absolutely. So, we integrate with every core out there, to kind of keep it in perspective. 

You know, so the big the big core such as Simitar Episys, Fiserv DNA, Keystone correlation. We know them well. 

We work with a number of clients who use all of those, courses that I’ve just mentioned as well as xp2 or, Silver Lake or CU Prodigy, Mizer, some of the older cores or less frequently used cores in the industry. We also support so the data the data process is typically done through a batch file process, but at a very high level, for these cores that are out there, it’s just a matter of making sure that the information that’s coming from your core banking system, meets a format that we’re able to accept. 

So, with that, we’re able to basically support all of the cores that are out there. I personally have not seen a core yet that we have not been able to support, because our process is a very generic or open ended process. 

Joseph Mearn 

46:14 – 46:23 

Awesome. Thanks, John. 

And I’m not seeing any more questions out there. So, with that, just a. 

John Cosgrove 

46:23 – 46:32 

We actually have one more on there. It’s at the bottom. 

It says, is there an easy way of transferring existing notes and data over? 

Joseph Mearn 

46:32 – 47:01 

Yep. We, we covered that. 

Alright. So, again, just a quick reminder that I’m reading link live, will be taking place April 29th to May 2nd in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort. 

So, if you have a registered yet, please go out and register for that event. And I just want to say thank you again all for joining us today. 

Hopefully, you were able to learn a lot about the correct platform and some of the trends that we see out there with the industry and technology. Thank you all.