Collections & Credit Risk articles from January 2006

Collections & Credit Risk archives from January 2006

Coming Home to a New Beat.
January 1, 2006... Joining SourceMedia, the parent company of Collections & Credit Risk, is a homecoming for me. Ten years ago, I joined a predecessor company of SourceMedia to launch another magazine here, Card Technology, writing about the then-new world of...

Letters To The Editor.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2006... Dramatic Reduction To the Editor: For the year 2006, I think there will be a dramatic reduction in bankruptcies filed. Until the new bankruptcy law is clarified, attorneys will be reluctant to handle bankruptcies because they do not...

Survey Results.
January 1, 2006... Here's how visitors to Credit & Collections World, Collections & Credit Risk's website, voted on this month's Instant Survey: With the stricter bankruptcy law now in place, do you expect the number of consumer petitions filed to...

Governments Embrace Outsourced Collections.
January 1, 2006... Government agencies - national, state and local too - are learning to trust collection agencies with their delinquencies as the perception of brass knuckles and no-neck thugs fades and strained governmental budgets force them to consider the...

What's New.
January 1, 2006... CheckFree Unveils Fraud Detection System Atlanta-based CheckFree launches an automated system to prevent and detect online fraud in the electronic bill payment process. CheckFree's FraudNet is supported by Actimize Inc.'s analytic...

KRG Buys Collect America.
January 1, 2006... KRG Capital Partners, a leveraged-buyout firm, purchased Collect America, a collection agency and debt buyer, for $350 million. Based in Denver, Collect America ranked as the 11th-largest debt buyer in the most recent rankings by Collections &...

Metris Emerges from its Cocoon: Delinquencies are down, asset quality is up; Metris finds the formula to succeed.
January 1, 2006... Success can be an unruly proposition. Mega-growth in one area of a business can create chaos in another. That imbalance stresses a system, and ultimately, grows into a distress that can undermine survival. That's exactly what happened at...

Economic Outlook: Disposable incomes will be pressured and that could mean more bad debt - and more opportunity for collections and debt-buying.
January 1, 2006... A NY credit card issuer who didn't shed a tear or two about 2005 drawing to a close may do so as 2006 progresses. That's because economists this year are predicting higher interest rates, slowing economic growth, high energy prices, a wave of...

The Experts Speak Six Major Issues to Watch in '06: From data security to offshoring, this year promises to offer a wide array of challenges.
January 1, 2006... John O'Donnell, vice president of collections operations at AFNI Inc., Bloomington, Ill., echoes the sentiments of many people in the collections and debt-buying arenas when he says of 2006: "We're cautiously optimistic as it pertains to the...

IVR Rings Up Success: Interactive voice recognition is rapidly taking root among collection agencies as a way to help hold the line on rising operating costs and to help increase agent productivity.
January 1, 2006... No matter how hard agencies and lenders try to reign in operating costs for their collection call centers, there is no getting around the fact that labor remains two-thirds of operating expenses. It's the biggest line item in the budget. Not...

How Users Benefit from IVR Technology.
January 1, 2006... Increases right party contacts two to six times over that of a power dialer Increases list penetration by up to 10 times compared to a dialer Increases recovery rates two to three times over that of a power dialer Generates three...

Navigating Through Sarbanes-Oxley: Privately held companies need to start thinking about how to comply as many states seek to extend the law's reach beyond public entities.
January 1, 2006... It's doubtful the people who ran Enron ever expected they would have a profound long-term impact on how public - and eventually even private - companies handle their accounting. Yet that's exactly what happened when Congress - outraged by...

Sellers Hide, Buyers Seek: Buyers and sellers of bad debt are playing a high-stakes game, one that often leaves buyers frustrated and sellers short-changed.
January 1, 2006... Bad-debt sellers paid close attention when high-profile data-security breaches struck the financial services world last year and put the spotlight squarely on consumer privacy. The problems rekindled fears about how consumer data is handled in...

The Regulatory Two-Step.
January 1, 2006... The debt-buying industry has shown a tendency to regulate itself from the start, roughly the early 1990s. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. kick-started bad-debt sales around then by selling assets from failed banks. For years, every...