ARM Compliance Business Solutions | Debra Ciskey talks Debt Collection Diversification | Ep 199

Adam Parks (00:01.696)

Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with a quiet industry legend, Deborah Siskie, who is on the compliance side of the world and has been for quite some time. Looking forward to learning from her today. How you doing today, Deborah?

Debra Ciskey (00:20.092)

I'm I'm great, Adam. Thanks. How are you?

Adam Parks (00:22.244)

I really do appreciate you coming on and having a chat with me. I think that your experience across a variety of areas of the space really can help educate me on some of the different movements that we should be expecting and challenges that we're seeing organizations face as they diversify their businesses. But before we jump into our core topic today, could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you get to the seat that you're in today?

Debra Ciskey (00:47.656)

All right, well, it's kind of a long story. So I started in this industry in 1980. And I answered an ad in the paper and I started working at ACA International. It was called American Collectors Association at the time. And I was an assistant in the public affairs department. So we did a lot of updating members about compliance issues. It was kind of like the legal reference.

Adam Parks (00:49.644)

That's all right, let's hear it.

Adam Parks (00:54.901)

Okay.

Debra Ciskey (01:16.092)

department in a way. The FDCPA was new. It was only four years old. know, actually it was only three years old at the time. And members were still adjusting to how to comply. They had a lot of questions. And so they would write us, you know, questions. That was before email and that was before text. So we'd get letters in the mail, thick ones. So people would send us all of their collection notices, like.

Debra Ciskey (01:39.516)

Are these okay? Do they comply? What should I do? How can I change them? Do I have to change them? know, and we'd give them feedback on those. I wrote some newsletters and, know, ACA had a legislative conference every year that was a really big part of its outreach to members and also to Congress. And so I planned those and wrote newsletters. It was fun. But after about...

five years I was promoted to director of education. So ACA had a huge education program that was in the day when we would do seminars in person, on site, around the country. We had a big faculty of about 30 instructors and they were always, know, each of them did five or six seminars a year. And so they were, you know, out traveling for ACA using all materials provided by ACA. So when I left ACA in 1993, had

started walking down the path of like computer-based training. created a, the first computer-based training on the FDCPA that won awards. That was great. That was back when we were still using green screen and no animation. Cause it was, we didn't know how to do that yet. Right. So I left there for, a small collection agency in Bloomington, Illinois that had 50 people at the time. I was there 21 years and ran training and development for them and

Adam Parks (02:48.108)

there.

Debra Ciskey (02:59.89)

then moved into compliance as it became one of the more forefront things that we had to do. You know, we could just assume we were compliant. had to have a plan and policies and all that good stuff. I was there until 1993 and the company had grown to 5,000 people by the time I left. And we can talk about how that happened later. And then I've worked at two other agencies since then. And then about two years ago, I was ready for a change and

got a hold of Sarah Wagerman from Arm Compliance Business Solutions and she was really in need of someone to help her because her client load was really getting heavy. And so she's like, I'm so glad you called me. I have work you can do tomorrow. And so, and that's really kind of how it works. So I started working for her and I've never looked back. I love my role now. It's a lot of fun and lots of, I'm not doing the same thing every day. And I love that. really, I don't like monotonous stuff.

Adam Parks (03:53.516)

So.

Well, let's talk a little bit about what you are doing there, right? So now that you're with Arm Business Compliance Solutions, talk to me a little bit about the kind of the projects that you're taking on.

Debra Ciskey (04:06.344)

So it's been fun. We have worked with companies that have been like going through a CFPB investigation, not investigations, but supervisor examinations, kind of helping them gather what they need to gather for that, or working with them kind of after it concludes. There are always like matters that need attention that need to be remediated. We help them write policies and procedures to help satisfy, you know, the regulator that.

Debra Ciskey (04:35.87)

they mean to make these changes and fix these issues. I'm also working with companies that really have been operating without policies and procedures. They're small, they felt they could run kind of informally, but they have a goal. They wanna grow. They wanna change their verticals that they're working in. There's reasons why they wanna finally kind of bring themselves to where they should be in 2024.

Debra Ciskey (05:02.966)

And so we're working with a couple of agencies just starting from scratch, building a compliance management system, which is a lot more than just policies and procedures, but you you have to start somewhere. And so these can be kind of long-term projects, but it's still different every day because I'm working with people at different levels in the company. Just depends on what I'm working on with them at the time. And I love it because I'm really, I'm kind of a people person and

and really love to build these relationships.

Adam Parks (05:34.284)

Well, you get to use your jack of all trades, right? And this was a job that I did over at Compliance for years was actually writing the policies and procedures for organizations in the space. And it really is a new and different challenge every day, because one day you're dealing with the IT department, the next day you're in client services, the next day you're in facilities and security, right? Like it's a taste of everything across an organization. I found it to be a great way to exercise the brain. Now,

Debra Ciskey (06:03.218)

Yeah, it really is because you can't just write a policy and say, I'm done with that because I have to, you have to train it. You have to implement it. You have to monitor it. You have to audit it. You might have to retrain it. So it's like you said, you touch everybody.

Adam Parks (06:17.28)

And it becomes a living breathing part of the organization itself, which I think leads to an interesting conversation today. You know, when it before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about organizations and their need for diversification. And I think as medical debt has come under attack, medical credit reporting, some of the other things that we're expecting to see, there's a lot of challenges that organizations are facing, and they're looking to leverage their economies of scope, meaning they've already got call centers and other things, why not use those for other services. And that could be call center services and

customer support and those types of things, or it could be the expansion into new products. And from new products that could be, they're gonna move into new credit origin, new.

Accounts originated of other types. They might move from medical into fintech or medical into credit card. And you start seeing these kind of migrations into new opportunities. But there's gotta be challenges that these organizations are facing as they're going through that process. I mean, you may have the economies of scope, but are you ready to move into fintech and develop a new expertise on a new product?

So as you've been helping organizations, what are some of the challenges that you're seeing organizations face as they look to diversify their service offerings?

Debra Ciskey (07:32.094)

Yeah, that's a good question. it just depends on where they're starting from. And so like I'm working with a small agency that has primarily collected medical debt for like two generations, literally. They're in their second generation of ownership and they're great people and they're a big family. That's how they've always seen themselves. And I think that's not a bad way to do business, but are you ready to grow your family like exponentially as you want to grow?

Adam Parks (07:37.782)

fair.

Debra Ciskey (08:02.328)

And because they've worked in this sort of family environment, haven't been, you know, they haven't just been very tough on following policies because guess what? They didn't have any policies. They kind of all did things the way that they've always done it. And that's fine until the people that have always been doing it are gone. Right. And so and the big difference between collecting medical debt and like just financial services debt is

Debra Ciskey (08:29.8)

these financial services companies are on such, you know, such extreme regulation as compared to like collecting medical debt, that you have to be able to show them that you know what you're doing and that you have policies in place that the regulators would expect you to have because they're always under scrutiny of regulators. And that scrutiny kind of trickles down from the creditor or the debt buyer to the debt collector. And it has to be ducks in a row at every level.

And so they realize that if they want to grow into that market, they have to be ready before they put their toe in the water because they won't get very wet if they aren't ready to go. Right. And so it's a challenge because it really is a change in mindset for these folks, especially when you're looking at the generational kind of component of the company. So, yeah.

Adam Parks (09:23.881)

And that leads to another interesting question, right? Because when you have these generational shifts, and I've seen some organizations handle this better than others, but also from a technology standpoint, moving into financial services products generally means that you're going to have to leverage different self-service technologies and other tool sets that maybe your organization didn't have. But when you're dealing with a small organization who maybe didn't have the detailed policies and procedures needed,

Are they facing these kind of IT challenges or are they embracing the opportunity to kind of incorporate new technology into their business?

Debra Ciskey (10:01.734)

Yeah, they're definitely facing the challenges and I've seen this, you know, like across the board, any companies I've worked with, they always lack some component that would help them be more productive or train their people better, faster, easier, you know, that kind of thing. And so, you know, the payment portal, you know, whole payment processing issue is really kind of.

one thing I've seen a lot of people facing, they're afraid of it a little bit. They've always done it a certain way and they, it works for them. But as they expand in markets, they're also geographically geographically expanding. so people aren't going to drop by and make their payment, right? Because they're forced dates over or, you know, people, especially as we're working with the younger people coming up, you know, in, in life, they're used to doing everything online.

And if you aren't set up to meet their needs, then you could be missing out. You know, like, can you send in checks? What? I've written a check ever. So no, I can't send in a check. I don't even have any. So now what are you going to do? Right. So you have to be ready. You have to be ready for that and think ahead. You know, how can you attract people to make that payment once they're convinced they need to pay then it's got to be easy. Right. And so we are certainly seeing that.

Adam Parks (11:23.444)

If they owe one company, they generally owe many companies and the company who makes it the most urgent and the most convenient is probably gonna be the first one to get the payments. And so on some level, I think we're, you all the collection organizations across the space are ultimately competing with each other for the same dollar from the consumer in demonstrating why we're providing that level of convenience. I agree, especially when it comes to credit card, FinTech.

Debra Ciskey (11:32.86)

Yes.

Adam Parks (11:48.796)

even auto loans, or even rent, right? Like landlord tenant debt used to be a lot of checks passing hands. But I think the technology and CRM systems and platforms that have been used to kind of manage those properties in the rent balances have all become more sophisticated. I think the part of that comes to, you know, the move to the cloud and so many organizations providing software as a service and really trying to simplify some of these processes. So

It's interesting to see how it all starts coming together. Do you think that there's more of a difficulty for an organization to move into a new product expertise versus a new geographic region? Or do you think that those challenges are roughly the same?

Debra Ciskey (12:34.82)

No, I don't think they're the same at all. I don't think the geographic challenge is as difficult. You know, the biggest challenge in expanding geographically is licensing. Right. So I know some businesses choose just to do business in states where licensing is required. And because they want to save the cost, they want to save the maintenance and sometimes reporting on all the stuff that comes with being licensed in some of these states that have a lot of rules. Right. And

But that's really the only consideration for expanding geographically. I guess one of the challenges, do you want to have people who live in the geographic regions that you're working in, or can your staff, wherever you are based, handle that? so, mean, remote work can solve that problem for sure. But it's changing the markets that you're working in is really tough because it's hard to gain expertise. Like if you're only collected medical debt,

And now you want to start working in financial service, whether it's FinTech or something else, there's a huge body of knowledge that you're not going to get by going to HFMA conferences. It's just different. HFMA is a great group and you learn a lot about medical revenue cycles and all that stuff by going to those conferences, but you're not going to learn what FinTech clients are going to need. So you really have to expand where you're...

networking with people, where you're getting your information, and even looking at different systems, like from a technology perspective, what's more successful in that marketplace?

Adam Parks (14:14.358)

Fair statement, think that each one of these moving into a new product does require a different level of expertise and not only the product type, but even just looking at the average balances. Whereas, you know, there are some differences to the geographic areas and where you're going to service the accounts from I think also plays a part in that. But the expansion from a geographic standpoint.

seems to be a little bit easier. I know a lot of organizations are starting to expand into let's say customer service type products as well and trying to leverage again that same infrastructure in a new way to move into the BPO services. Have you worked with any groups that have started kind of looking, let's say up the credit cycle chain or completely in a new direction into let's call it the client services realm?

Debra Ciskey (15:03.536)

Yeah, I really have had a lot of experience in that area. when I was with the first agency I worked at, we expanded from purely a debt collection company to handling customer service for a lot of the big telecoms and other companies that had direct products to customers. And it was a slow movement, which I think was good because it

really has a lot to do with, you know, changing your culture a bit, finding the right people to do the work, figuring out how you're going to now train all these people and how are you going to integrate the necessary technology? And I mean, it was really a strategic way that this company went into what they're doing. And it's been extremely successful, but it was baby steps like take on one service. They started with handling bankrupt accounts for, for that company. had their own division doing it.

but it wasn't adequately staffed and they wanted to, it's not like wasn't their core business. So they wanted to get out of doing that, right? And so they outsource it to our company. And that was kind of how we got used to using their internal systems and tried to see how we could benefit from that on the collection side of the house, but also what other customer service needs do they have? So, I we started doing cell phone activations and you name it, it expanded.

Debra Ciskey (16:30.034)

greatly and it's now they're like core services. but it took, you know, I left there in 93 and they were just expanding like into outsourcing, like with some of these BPO companies that are outside, the United States, you know, map. And now they're, you know, they've just jumped, they've doubled in size since 93. So it's amazing.

Adam Parks (16:54.188)

I think moving into some of those BPO services is an interesting solution. And even if you're not gonna outsource outside of the United States, providing some of those customer service options with US based callers, I think also provide some really interesting experiences. I think about American Airlines and other organizations to wear customer service, right? And phone based customer service is a key attribute, but a lot of that.

workforce tends to be remote and whether that's remote at home or remote in, you know, a call center environment is allows organizations to tap the labor pools beyond their geographic locations. And that's where I think we start to see some of that additional value when you when you're weighing the difference of I need to diversify my business and I need to expand my

My labor pool in new ways too, right? Because call centers are not always in metropolitan areas and sometimes you're off in a less populated area.

Debra Ciskey (17:57.926)

Yeah, that's true. And I think as we look at the future of this whole diversification, I mean, and we look at the workforce, we need people, right? Well, the day is going to come where we might not need so many people because we can integrate AI into a lot of the work that's done by a person. know, there's a lot of work that doesn't really need a person to do it if we've got the you know, the right systems for AI and making it easy to

Debra Ciskey (18:26.728)

talk to someone without really talking to them. You know what I mean? It's a little scary in a way, but I'd really think we have to look at that future. I think in five years, it's all that BPO and customer service is gonna be extremely different from how it is today.

Adam Parks (18:44.708)

I always think about the opportunities and I'm going to use the airlines again as an example. But when I call into American Airlines and I get the automated system right, like I have that phone number, I can call for that. But I also have a phone number, I can get somebody on the phone. I never call the automated system. So I don't think we're ever going to be truly replaced by AI. But I think it will enable agents to enhance themselves, meaning finding answers to questions faster, right and still having kind of that

person in the middle that human in the loop at least for the next five years or so, because I don't know anybody who intentionally calls into an automated system and is like excited about it, right. But when we can get a live person on the phone, we feel like we can solve our problems and that person has some level of

Debra Ciskey (19:25.651)

Well...

Adam Parks (19:30.804)

empathy for the situation that we're going through or that we can discuss it in some way and it's not just a rules based program. I think that there's going to be some challenges as it comes to that too, because you've got a lot of organizations last year, if you looked at the TransUnion third party debt collection survey, I want to say it was 40 % of organizations said that they would never touch artificial intelligence, you know,

this year, it's significantly less. And I think it's interesting to see the seismic shift in our industry towards moving or experimenting with those types of technologies. But I think that the use cases are not as well understood across the space. And I look forward to talking about that a lot in 2025 on our new podcast series, the AI Hub. It'll...

Debra Ciskey (20:19.561)

yeah, wow.

Adam Parks (20:21.26)

It's a conversation that I really like to have. I like to go deep nerd sometimes with some of these models and truly get an understanding of what's behind the data and to try and visualize some of that information in new ways. You know, as we think about the diversification challenges that organizations are facing across the space, is there any advice that you would kind of give to these companies as they start their journey down the process of diversifying?

Debra Ciskey (20:25.406)

Thank

Debra Ciskey (20:49.942)

Well, let me think. It certainly means you have to open your mind, you know, because it never is the same once you're inside as it looks going in, right? So you might think, it's easy. We've been collecting medical debt. is it, how can collecting is collecting, right? How is it going to be different from working with credit card collections or, you know, collecting loans or FinTech, whatever. It's hugely different.

especially if you want to continue down the road of being a data furnisher, doing credit reporting. We know we've seen that diminish on the medical side because of the changes the bureaus themselves have made and the regulatory things that we're facing. We're seeing that it's not going to be the same in medical debt collection. That's what's driving a lot of people to diversify. it really, I think, is going to require just a different mindset.

The people that you're working with are a lot different. find that, I find that people that work in the medical field, the medical back office people are just more relaxed and they're not in such a big hurry. I mean, this is just Frank, but you get to people that work in the financial services industry and they always feel like they're behind and we need to move and they want things fast and you have to be ready for that because.

you know, once they have decided we're going to go with you, it's like, how fast can you be ready? Four weeks enough, five weeks enough, three weeks enough, that'd be better. So, I mean, that was something that I learned sort of the hard way. And I've seen it repeated now over and over with that vertical at least. Yeah.

Adam Parks (22:36.292)

I think as I as I talk to an organization who's about to start a diversification journey, one of the things that I always try to remind them is that they need to schedule some time to work on their business and not just in their business. We all spend time in our business every day doing our day to day functions and keep our businesses running. But when if we're going to go through the journey of diversifying our product offerings, we need to be prepared to spend some time working.

Adam Parks (23:05.19)

on the business, defining those products, understanding those strategies, it's more time in the analytics and measurements, building our experiments so that we can learn documenting our experiments along the way. I think there's a lot of different pieces and parts, but if you can't forget that you're going to have to spend some time working on the business.

Debra Ciskey (23:14.354)

Right.

Adam Parks (24:29.12)

That's exactly it. I've always done it. And I understand wanting to keep your finger on the pulse of everything that's happening, right? I understand wanting to put that mail, put eyes on the mail before handing it over to the administrative staff, because it's allowing you to keep some sort of a finger on the pulse. And it's giving you some, let's call it early indicators as to what your day is going to look like. But you can't do it at scale, you have to start to

diversify, if you're to diversify your organization, you need to diversify yourself and you need to start looking at where is my time best spent? Where is the time that I'm putting in today going to be the most valuable? And I think that's why some organizations have fallen behind on policies and procedures through the years because they don't look at that time to work on the business when they're so busy picking up the mail and working in the business.

Debra, I really do appreciate you coming on and having a chat with me today. This was a lot of fun. I really do learn a lot from every time I have a chance to talk to you.

Adam Parks (25:33.01)

Absolutely. For those of you that are watching, if you have additional questions you'd like to ask Deborah or myself, you can leave those in the comments on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see us discuss, you can leave those in the comments below and hopefully I can get Deborah to come back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, Deborah, I really do appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for joining me today. And thank you everybody for watching. We'll see you all again soon. Bye everybody.