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5 Standard Reports Your Outsourced Collections Partner Should Provide
If your financial institution works with a third-party vendor for your collections efforts, you know how important it is to ensure your partners perform at an optimal level. To properly evaluate whether your outsourced partner is performing at a high level, it’s wise to understand their company procedures and establish agreed upon benchmarks to measure their performance.
One way to do this is to make sure that you’re getting enough information in their reports to give you a full 360-degree view of their performance.
An outsourced collections provider is only as valuable as the reporting they provide. After all, if they aren't providing robust reporting to demonstrate to you how many calls they're making, their cure rates, queue averages, payment activity, etc., how can you fully understand how well your portfolio is performing?
To ensure that your outsourced collections partner is performing at a high level, it’s a good idea to insist that they provide the following standard reports:
MTD (Month to Date) Daily Report
This daily report allows the client to keep tabs on the daily calling and results. Structuring this report in such a way to identify trends allows the client to make both internal adjustments and work with their collections partner to adjust strategies as needed.
The MTD daily report typically includes the following information:
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Accounts presented
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Total attempts
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File penetration
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Right party connects
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Promises-to-pay
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Payments taken
Client Action Item Report
This daily report allows the collections team to quickly identify, research, and resolve any urgent requests or issues that may have arisen during the previous business day. This report may be broken out into separate reports for the ease of use by the collections staff.
The client action report will contain information such as:
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Fund transfer requests
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Supervisor escalations or urgent concerns
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Updated address and phone number from collection agent notes
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TCPA Revocation of Consent
Balance Impact Report
This end-of-month report is essential for quantifying the efforts of the collections team, as well as analyzing the effectiveness and results in comparison to the billable instances. Viewing the aggregate of the daily efforts found in the monthly balance impact report can provide perspective into longer term trending and allows for a more comprehensive perspective into collections efforts.
The balance impact report should contain the following information:
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Unique invoiced accounts
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Total attempts
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File penetration
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Right party connects vs invoiced accounts
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Promises-to-pay
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Payments taken
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Conversion rate
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Balances impacted
Reason for Delivery Report
Provided monthly, this report allows credit unions to leverage data to determine whether their portfolio is experiencing impacts of national or regional trends.
The Reason for Delivery report includes information like:
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Member-stated reason for delinquency
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Account number impacted
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Member name, date, and time of call
Invoiced Detail Report
This monthly report is required for tracking and vendor management. It's recommended that financial institutions spot-check this report and use internal reporting to cross-reference the invoice to ensure that the strategy for sending accounts to their collections partner is optimal.
This monthly report includes all accounts that had a billable action.
Most financial institution executives spend a fair amount of time evaluating their partners' performance, but it's also important to work with a collections provider that proactively monitors and reports on their program's efficiency and efficacy.
Added value, such as monthly status reports, can help you identify data trends in order to make program tweaks, creating more efficiencies for your collections activity. Likewise, a great partner will have tools and systems in place that allow you to self-serve, accessing highly visual, customized reports that give you the data that is most important to your institution.
Vetting vendors is certainly not a quick or easy process. It requires thorough due diligence, but in the end, when you take the time to find the right outsourced collections provider for your institution, it will be well worth the time and effort.
Have you evaluated your credit union’s collections operation lately? Take our self-assessment, A Guide to Auditing Your In-House Collections.
Brian Croom
As Assistant Vice President of Operations at SWBC, Brian Croom is responsible for systems and processes related to collections, collections workflow, and reporting. Brian brought ten years of call center experience when he joined SWBC as manager of payment reminder services in 2008.
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