TDX Launches in North America, Marvin Gay, Disney, and “Going to PLATO”

In the words of the famous singer Marvin Gay, I would like to address the question of “What’s going on!”

As many of you may know, following on from TDX Group’s successful launches in Spain and Australia, we have entered into the US market. Our head office has been established in 'Old Town' Alexandria just outside of Washington DC, and we are well on our way to building a great business. As we move forward, I want to thank you all (our existing clients, staff in Nottingham, and many global partners) for the enthusiasm and help in our set up.

As anybody who has been to Disney knows, 'It’s a small world', indeed when we look at collections globally, the challenges facing creditors are remarkably similar. Let me share with you a little of what those look like here in the USA:

• Our primary regulatory body the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) has aggressively started putting creditors and collectors on notice on a wide range of issues regarding the treatment of consumers.
• Fines and penalties have started to be levied in the range of millions of dollars.
• Creditors lack the tools to effectively operate in this environment, specifically to manage and be compliant in their outsourced Debt Collection Agency (DCA) activity.
• Challenges include: lack of visibility into activity, lack of ability to effectively place and recall account, ineffective management of queries, lack of the ability to truly test and learn strategies, lack of the ability to effectively place compliantly and confidently with a wide Agency panel.
• Our view and analysis shows that creditors are making irrational choices because of lack of appropriate systems, including consolidating the number of Agencies on their panels leaving them in a downward spiral that will negatively impact returns by 10-30%.
• IT resources are constrained and the majority of tools require long integration time frames.
• Agencies are consolidating and many are ill equipped to take advantage or 'win' in this environment.  They have spent the last several years on low cost off shoring and dialler technologies instead of smart data and analytic strategies.

That all leaves us in a very familiar place . . . going to PLATO!  We believe strongly that we have a good story to tell.  PLATO (our SaaS based debt placement and management solution) has been developed with the goal of driving performance at the granular account level, exposing data so that all consumers get treated fairly through the complex strategies creditors need to deploy. We built it because we knew that visibility and data drives performance. As it turns out, that same visibility and data now helps assure compliance and organizational efficiency.

Over the course of the next couple months I will try to dive deeper into these issues, but for now thanks again for the warm welcome back.  John

By John Telford, CEO - North America, TDX Group