Dynamic Dunning Process for A Fraught Financial Landscape
Enterprise dunning processes are facing the pressures of an increasingly complex landscape. Not only must they provide appropriate collection treatment for each unique customer, they must do so within an unprecedented operating environment.
Even prior to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, debt collection and dunning processes were facing hurdles in delivering fit-for-purpose solutions in a high-volume and dynamic marketplace. The current period of uncertainty has further amplified those challenges, increasing financial pressures on both businesses and their customers.
Optimus Dunning provides a dynamic dunning solution that enables enterprises to successfully automate and customize dunning and collection strategies, freeing up agents for higher value work, and allowing businesses to maintain vital dunning process workflow. That’s an invaluable opportunity to improve debt collection processes while meeting growing customer demand in a fraught financial landscape.
Adapting to a difficult landscape for dunning processes
The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a seismic shock to the global economy. In the World Bank’s June 2020 Global Economic Prospects report, the organization lays out its baseline predictions for a 5.2% contraction in global GDP in 2020.
This macroeconomic shock reflects the big picture view of individual financial challenges. 2020 is expected to deliver an unprecedented contraction of per capita income. Advanced economies are expected to shrink on average by 7%, and emerging markets by 2.5%, leading to per capita income falls in the largest share of countries globally since 1870.
Analysis from the UK shows that personal debt is expected to balloon by GBP6bil nationally as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an estimated 4.6mil households at risk of building up excess debt. The study indicates that impacted adults will on average accumulate an excess GBP997 in debt and GBP1,076 of arrears. This scenario is likely to be replicated across many major global economies, as individuals turn to sources of credit in order to overcome income shortfalls resulting from COVID-19-inspired lockdowns and job losses.
The scale of global debt is already staggering. A study by the Institute of International Finance revealed that total global debt increased by US$10tril to US$255tril in 2019, US$87tril higher than the global debt burden at the start of the 2008 Financial Crisis. COVID-19 could well be a catalyst for an even deeper debt spiral in 2020.
While customers struggle to meet their individual debt challenges, enterprises are facing their own stresses when it comes to meeting operational needs. Many industries are experiencing subdued demand, reduced revenues, and workforce challenges from lockdown restrictions or infection risks. Maintaining effective dunning processes is extremely challenging under these conditions.
The ability to adapt and offer customised solutions in this difficult environment is critical. Crucially, that will include the need to balance high-volume workloads with a flexible approach that recognizes the financial challenges which many customers may be facing.
Customizing workflow through configuration with Optimus
Neural Technologies’ Optimus Dunning solution is a highly-configurable debt collection software platform, providing automated treatments for individual or segmented customer groups. It incorporates all the essential dunning functions required for enterprises to deliver on their collection strategy, while freeing up valuable key workers to deal with more complex cases which require manual intervention. Business oversight is easily maintained through simple, user-friendly analytics that provide insight at every stage of the process.
Neural Technologies’ dunning solution helps enterprises improve their collection process and success rate, and is quickly deployed with rapid time to market. It supports creating treatment for promise-to-pay features easily allowing grace periods on collections, and exceptions such as special customer groups, specific holidays, or weekends as desired. That ensures collection flexibility that enables a dunning strategy to meet the needs of both customers and businesses in a difficult financial landscape.
With the volatility of the current environment, Optimus Dunning provides a fast-to-market solution that can be rapidly deployed, and quickly scaled up as business needs require. The consistent and automated workflow, configurable nature, and simple backend integration result in improved debt collection processes and success rates for enterprises.
Delayed and deferred payments may be an unfortunate constant in an otherwise uncertain operating environment going forward. Neural Technologies’ solution provides a customizable, automated approach that meets crucial workflow requirements while enabling fair and transparent treatment for customers.
Get in touch with Neural Technologies to find out more about how our dunning solutions can help your business