We are excited to announce that InDebted has partnered with Experian in order to deliver enhanced collection processes and customer experiences for our mutual clients. Through the integration of PowerCurve Collections and InDebted, organisations can benefit from an out of the box API-first integration between the two platforms. This enables a seamless utilisation of InDebted’s full suite of features without the cost and complexity of developing and maintaining the integration in house.
Our integration with PowerCurve marks our first official prebuilt integration and Experian as our first such partner. This is all part of our goal to make it even easier to get setup and scale with InDebted, no code required.
The affiliation between our two organisations also allows us to support potential clients with what is clearly an emerging trend - the move away from collections BPO’s and people-based first party outsourcing. Too often we speak with organisations that are hamstrung through an existing outsourcing relationship. Their data and processes sit inside another organisation's platform, that platform isn’t best in class (rather another instance of their own outdated tools), and their commercial models scale based on headcount and not technology. This approach misaligns partners from mutually working together to drive efficiencies at scale. Instead, you see a ~60 FTE account allocation balloon to ~200 FTE during COVID as we have seen first hand with one of our large banking clients.
PowerCurve Collections allows large enterprises to take control of their internal collection process and leverage data and analytics to make informed decisions that scale. This in turn reduces the cost to collect whilst enhancing the customer experience. Over the last 12 months many of our enterprise clients have adopted PowerCurve to enhance their digital and data-driven collections, then partnered with InDebted to do the same on their behalf (when the time is right). This collaboration between InDebted and Experian will allow us to help more large organisations do just that.
The need for API-first products in collections
One of the things that first struck me when I entered the world of collections was a lack of appreciation for the structure, consumption, and design of integrations between creditors and their collection agencies. In collections it is normal to receive unstructured files, in formats from CSV to DAT (whatever that is), that are neither consistent in their formatting nor the data they provide. In fact you can often be considered “irrational” for suggesting that a creditor integrate according to your API specifications (despite the numerous benefits in doing so).
This is very different from the API-first world that I grew up in. One in which you can build a business in a matter of days, focus on your core competencies, and leverage a plethora of products that support your go to market faster than you could ever do yourself. When I built the MVP for InDebted nearly 5 years ago one of the first things I did was look at what aspects of the stack that could be abstracted from the core functionality we needed to provide. Payments was a perfect example of this. If it wasn’t for products like Stripe I would have spent most of my time (and money) on building something that someone else is always going to do better than us.
Continuing with the example of Stripe for a moment. As an engineer and product nerd I see beauty in the design of their API. An incredible amount of effort from a group of extremely talented teams has been put in behind the scenes to expose endpoints that are simple and effective. In fact their website literally says
“The world’s most powerful and easy-to-use APIs - We agonize over the right abstractions so your teams don’t need to stitch together disparate systems or spend months integrating payments functionality.”
InDebted embraces this approach in how we think about our product. Firstly, we think about ourselves as a product not just a service offering. Our product is an abstraction of a core set of competencies to which we are the best in, that allow our clients to focus on what they are best at. We agonise over every aspect of the design of our product and API’s. It’s not uncommon to see lengthy threads in Slack as our Product and Engineering teams debate on what to name a particular event or endpoint. Everything needs to make sense within the broader context of our business, this is why you will never find the word ‘Debtor’ in our codebase.
This approach to collections allows us to build scalable architecture that our clients can leverage. We deliver new releases that enhance the experiences for our customers by utilising data from our clients. For example, last year we shipped an update to support unique product considerations for BNPL and Credit Cards clients. This in turn allowed us to easily convey further contextual information for customers than resulted in a reduction of inbound queries and improvement in recoveries performance.
What this means for our mutual clients (and their customers)
Mutual clients that leverage the integration benefit from all of the features that both products offer without any internal integration effort. The product teams at InDebted and Experian ensure that the integration remains up to date with our latest changes. We have standardised the transfer of data between the two platforms and follow secure principals that protect customer data both in transit and at rest.
InDebted, Experian, and our clients can work together to leverage mutual data assets to enhance performance across the entire customer lifecycle. All updated customer data collected by InDebted is automatically transferred back to PowerCurve to ensure that our clients have the most up to date information on their customers.
Our shared customers experience a best in class collections process, no matter how far through the journey they are. They are provided with the ability to self-serve at a time that suits them, and should they wish to speak with someone, they receive the most customer-centric collections solution in the market. This obsession with the customer allows our mutual clients to outsource their collections earlier in the journey without compromising on customer experience or risking their brand reputation.
We are really excited by the potential for this partnership and look forward to doing more great work together in the future.
You can read more about our partnership with Experian here:
- Mortgage Business: InDebted partners with Experian
