Adam Parks (00:08)
Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with an extra special guest, Mr. George Simons, joining me here from Solo to talk about how their organization has evolved and where he found the passion to be helping consumers in their debt collection or in their financial journey. So George, thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights.
George Simons (00:09)
Thank Happy to be here, Adam.
Adam Parks (00:37)
So for anyone who has not been as lucky as me to get to know you a little bit, can you tell everyone a little about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?
George Simons (00:46)
For sure. Yep, so I'm the founder of Solo and we make it easy for collectors to resolve debt with consumers. Got into this position a little bit of a winding path in my first year of law school. Bought a car that turned out to be a lemon. Died on me three days after I bought it. And I tried getting all my money back and I tried finding an attorney to help me out. I couldn't find one that take my case. I thought, man, if I'm a building full of lawyers and I can't find one to hire, who else out there can't find a lawyer to hire? and dove into the problem a little bit more, found out that debt collection lawsuits are the biggest category of cases in the US. And consumers oftentimes don't have a lawyer helping them out through the process. So we made Solo to make it easy for them to engage with the collector. That was V1. And then from there, we found that consumers really want to settle these cases. So we then made Solo settle and made it easy for the consumer to connect with the collector and get these cases fully resolved.
Adam Parks (01:43)
Well, there's some unique challenges in that realm to being able to resolve those accounts and assist the consumer. You've also done some financial literacy content and some other things to empower those consumers in their minds. Talk to me a little about what kind of drove you towards creating this type of a platform for everyone.
George Simons (02:01)
Yeah, it's really about solving the problem for me. So, you know, I talk with collectors all the time, talked with consumers all the time. And a key insight that we've had is that they really want the same thing, which is an ideal settlement as fast as possible. Everyone can pretty much agree on what as fast as possible means. The question is the ideal settlement. And right now what happens is people just engage in positional based marketing where the consumer out of fear will like lob some lowball offer to the collector. And then the collector will lob an offer back to the consumer saying, hey, you like you have no leverage here. You're going to pay us this full amount or something like that. And then it kind of goes back and forth. Maybe they end up meeting in the middle over a period of time. And that's where things are right now. And what we found is that as we can to get to that ideal settlement faster, we can increase the trust.
George Simons (02:53)
and increase the information between the parties. So really we're creating a high trust, high information environment, which allows people to get to an ideal settlement very quickly, even instantly in many situations.
Adam Parks (03:06)
So the speed is definitely a factor and then the value of that settlement is another kind of remaining factor there. Now in terms of the speed, collection lawsuits are slow, the court systems are slow. How have you been able to impact the process to bring that speed to marketplace?
George Simons (03:23)
It's a lot about gathering the information that both parties need upfront. So on the consumer side, what we're doing there is they can just take a picture of their collection documents so we get all of the right inputs upfront. They don't have to deal with any typos about them entering info. And then we're able to connect into various sources to get their personal information like SSN, date of birth, street address, then we're also able to connect into their finances. So we're getting verified bank statements for the last two years, not from the consumer. Again, there's no typos involved. They can't lie. They can't make stuff up. We're just getting verified API level data on their financial accounts so we can see how much money they've made over the last couple of years. Do they have net cashflow positive every month? Do they have a bunch of money saved up? Are they at a positive balance sheet that have a bunch of money saved up somewhere that you can use to pay off all of these debts, et cetera. And so we're gathering all of that upfront from the consumer. And then on the collector, the collectors work with us and just let us know what kind of parameters they have on the client side. And the client will let them resolve a debt for this amount or they need to hit this kind of benchmark, et cetera.
George Simons (04:46)
then we can really put all of that into our algorithm and figure out the optimal settlement for both sides and get it resolved instantaneously and move on our way.
Adam Parks (04:59)
That's some really interesting piece that you are connecting into the consumers finances. So it's not just consumer A saying, hey, I only make x or I'm spending y like you're actually seeing what's within those bank statements and how that spending is being dispersed and whether or not there's actually a capability to pay. So you're not just providing an opportunity for blanket settlement, you're providing an opportunity for let's call it a filtration on the consumer side. So that we can increase the level of trust in the transaction. Am I understanding that right?
George Simons (05:34)
That's right, exactly. Yes, and the only reason that the back and forth is required is because there's either low trust or low information. Either the one party doesn't trust the other party, so they're just going to counter offer, or they don't know what the other party actually can do, so they're going to counter offer. But really, when there's high trust time information, you can just get to a settlement or resolution much faster.
Well, no information. How could you ever get to developing any level of trust? Because it doesn't really exist. And I think that the debt collectors themselves are pretty limited on the amount of information that they're legally allowed to collect and where they're able to source that information from, which creates a pretty difficult environment, right? And a low level of trust. But when you're talking about high information and high trust, that sounds pretty intriguing from my perspective, because we think about the consumer actively going through this process. But I think maybe the most important part of that is that the consumer is actively engaging. So you're providing yet another opportunity for that consumer to engage in the debt collection process, which I think is what all parties are ultimately looking for, is that connection to be able to have a discussion and to start or open those talks.
George Simons (06:48)
Yes. Yeah, you bring up a good point with the collector, right? They are somewhat limited in what they can say and how they can say it. Right? For example, in our conversations with consumers, The collector has to say, this is an attempt to collect the debt. Anything you say will be used for the purposes of collecting that debt. holy crap.
George Simons (07:08)
talk about inflicting fear into a consumer, right? The collector has to say that, but no consumer is going to be happy upon hearing that. They're going to be scared out of their mind when they hear that. And I think because of that, there's really a crucial piece of the puzzle is having a third party helping mediate the discussion forward and that third party hears solo. And I think that's one of the reasons why to date,
George Simons (07:34)
hundreds of collectors have been able to recover millions of dollars through solo.
Adam Parks (07:39)
Well, for me, it was, you we started having these conversations, I guess around the beginning of the year. And as I saw some of the groups that I truly respect, start to participate in the platform and get a better understanding of the success that they were finding through the use of SoloSettle. It really kind of brought me back to saying, I want to have some discussions about this. I want to learn more. And that's been interesting for me personally, to kind of see how that's evolved but your organization didn't start where it ended. Talk to me a little bit about the journey that you've had as an organization going from getting a car that turned out to be a lemon, identifying that problem kind of to where you are today, really actively helping organizations to resolve the outstanding debts. Talk to me a little bit about what that process has looked like and what your journey has been.
George Simons (08:26)
Yeah, as I like to mention, we now have really realized that consumers and collectors want the same thing, which is an ideal settlement as fast as possible. And we started off more on the consumer side. We started off just with solo suit, making it easy for the consumer to respond to a lawsuit. And we saw quite a lot of traction there. Consumers are scared, they're fearful, they don't understand how the process works. We publish a lot of content educating the consumer on how the process works. And then we found that consumers really just want to get the debt resolved. Most of the time, they recognize that they owe the debt.
George Simons (09:06)
They feel an obligation to pay off the debt. And nobody's really stoked about like bankruptcy, right? Nobody goes into bankruptcy like being stoked. Yeah, I'm finally going to get off the hook for all this debt. Nobody's really stoked about that. They want to pay back their obligations. They want to be, good people and wrap things up. And from just having those conversations with consumers really, led us down the path of looking into settlement. And then after talking with collectors, we found that collectors really
George Simons (09:31)
want settlement as well. They don't actually necessarily want to go into garnishment. Garnishment can be expensive. It can be difficult regulatory path. They also don't want to call the consumer once again and leave another voicemail. They don't want to send the consumer yet another email. They just want to get the settlement in place and start getting paid on the debt as well. And then that's why, you know, with the conversations, that's one of the reasons why I brought Yale Levy.
George Simons (09:59)
the past president of the National Creditors Bar Association, onto the team at Solo. Very glad to have Yale on board. And he's been doing a great job. We're doing a national tour with Yale where we're visiting collectors around the US and having great events and really having quite warm receptions in the different places that we're visiting.
Adam Parks (10:20)
I think it's an education process. And once people truly understand how the organization has evolved and what it is that you're providing to the consumers these days, I mean, at least in the conversations that I've kind of watched, especially like the debt connection symposium conference, it helped me to better see how the industry was engaging with this type of platform and what that future might look like over the next couple of years. For me, I think there's a lot of opportunity here because the consumers do ultimately want to resolve the debt. There's only so many options that they have from a debt relief standpoint and credit counseling and consolidation loans and all of that might be options for some people, but they don't even necessarily understand what those options are. And like you said, they don't understand what the process even entails. So they've not participated in the past, default judgments get rendered, and then we start spiraling because the consumer is still extremely standoffish, but the only thing that we can really do is try and help them with some level of education so that they can understand it. Now, if that education comes from a law firm, it doesn't feel as authoritative or as real for the consumer if it's happening or if that education is trying to come from the other side of the equation. I'm curious, how has the financial literacy and helping the consumers to educate them, how has that gone for you as an organization? Any tips that you can provide to the debt collection industry to help them get the consumer on the right path and the right journey?
George Simons (11:48)
Yeah, it's going well. And it really stems from the crucial insight, collectors and consumers want the same thing, which is an ideal settlement as fast as possible. And that insight is what allows us to work cooperatively with collectors and consumers. I think without that insight, think without that insight,
George Simons (12:07)
we might feel like we were â leading consumers down the wrong path for the benefit of the collectors or we're leading collectors astray for the benefit of consumers. But really we understand that they want the same thing. And so with consumers, we're educating them on what they actually want, which is a resolution to the debt.
Adam Parks (12:07)
we might feel like we were leading consumers down the wrong path for the benefit of the collectors or leading collectors astray for the benefit of consumers. We really would understand that they'd want the same thing. And so if consumers were advocating that model to actually want what's his resolution to the debt.
George Simons (12:25)
Right? think previously consumers may have believed that what they want, if they're being sued for debt, is to get the case dismissed on a technicality because they're served improperly. But that's not going to resolve things for the consumer. The collector can still, it's probably not going to be dismissed with prejudice. So the collector can still come after the consumer outside of court. They can file the lawsuit again in court, et cetera. So it's not a real resolution. And so for the consumer, we're educating them on the way to get this resolved is to get a resolution, either pay back the debt in full, if you can get a settlement in writing, pay that off over time and go down that path. Right. think previously, you know, at some point in time, I talked with a consumer who admittedly after using our answer product, he said, dude, you guys are onto gold here. I can just get all the credit cards I want and get all the debt I want. And then just respond to the lawsuit with an answer and get off the hook. I like face-palmed myself. I'm like, no, that's not what we're building here. That's not what we're doing.
And with that, we really transitioned more into settlement and helping people pay back the debt that they owe. And I feel like if an indicator for me on success of Solo is that if one day in the future my personal interest rates on loans are lowered, I will have considered Solo successful venture. If we're actually bringing down interest rates because more people are paying back their debt. And I think a huge factor of that for collectors that I point out.
George Simons (13:55)
is that most collection orgs only recover about 30 % of their portfolio. 70 % of debt goes uncollected. And with Solo, we want more of those accounts to be paid. We want to make it easier for consumers to pay back more of the debt that owe. We providing that bridge for the conversation and you know, there's a lot of friction in the conversation itself. Have you found a lot of success in the digital realm by providing that this uncomfortable conversation between two parties that neither party necessarily wants to have is easier in the digital realm?
George Simons (14:32)
For sure. Yeah, we could only do what we're doing in the digital realm. Because Solo doesn't, we aren't offering people into the equation. We're just offering our software into the equation and software is helping the consumer connect with the collector. And that is necessarily a digital native digital first experience.
Well, I can say that from an artificial intelligence standpoint, for example, that a lot of organizations have started looking to deploy artificial intelligence because there's a theory that the consumer will feel, quote, less shame in the communication process, and it provides a new opportunity for them to engage without having to get on the phone and have an uncomfortable conversation. So it feels like the collection industry has really started looking at these new technology and tools in order to bridge that gap, to bridge that conversation and allow the two parties to come together for conversation. And it sounds like that's exactly what you are able to do for both sides. The collector doesn't have to spend the time and money making the outbound communications, the text messages, the emails, all of those things when the consumer is actively coming to them. And then if I remember correctly, from a pricing standpoint, you're not actually charging the collector anything to participate in this process, but basically that the consumer is covering those costs and the collectors can plug into the platform and whatever settlements that they've kind of refused to look at in the past, they can start to look at and most likely, if we're talking about a law firm, there's already some money on the table for them today, they just have to engage and start the process.
George Simons (16:14)
That's right. Yep, it's a consumer-initiated settlement platform. And for the collectors who are engaged, they're recovering millions of dollars. And then there are still some collectors who haven't engaged yet, and they have millions of dollars on the table right now waiting for them.
Adam Parks (16:30)
Well, that's where I would like to encourage our audience to go and engage with the platform. What does that process look like to engage as a debt collector and to get the ball rolling?
George Simons (16:41)
So to engage as a debt collector, most debt collectors throughout the industry have already received some kind of an invitation from a consumer to resolve the debt via Solo. So they have an email from Solo and there's a link in it. They can click that link, come to solosuit.com slash collectors. I can understand some hesitancy around clicking links and emails, right? People always want to make sure they're legit.
George Simons (17:05)
You can always just go to solosuit.com slash collectors and then log into your firm's account with the account there. And then once you log in to your firm's dashboard for whether you're a collection agency, a debt buyer doing collections on your own accounts or a collection law firm, you can see all of the accounts that consumers have brought to Solo.
George Simons (17:33)
And asked you to resolve on solo. then you can just basically just like click one or two buttons and then you're resolving accounts. can, you know, if you're, you're moving along quickly, you can really resolve an account in five to 10 seconds.
Adam Parks (17:49)
So we are talking about a grand total of about five clicks for somebody to be able to go recover the capital that is already waiting on the platform for them. I definitely understand things getting lost in emails. I know a lot of collectors, including myself, can receive a thousand emails in a day, so I can understand the challenges there, but I'll put that link below as well, solosuit.com slash collectors for those that wanna go actively engage with the platform and start poking around and getting a feel for what is truly available there. Because through the conversations that I've had with a couple of your collectors that have been wildly successful on the platform and just having a chance to talk to Yale and others, it's been interesting to see just how much your organization has changed over a couple of years and you've really focused your efforts and energy on becoming the bridge between two worlds, which I think is rather difficult and complex. So it feels like you guys must've put a lot of thought and energy into building a platform that has these capabilities. What would you say to a debt collector that has not actively engaged yet? What message do you have for them?
George Simons (18:57)
The message for a collector who has not yet engaged is that We recognize collectors and consumers want the same thing, an ideal settlement as fast as possible. They can do that just by logging into the dashboard and then clicking a few buttons and resolving an account. I think compliance is oftentimes the big issue, I think, for collectors who have not yet engaged. And probably what I'd say to that is that hundreds of collectors, whether that's a collection agency, collection law firm, debt buyer, creditor,
George Simons (19:29)
has used Solo to resolve debts, millions of dollars at this point. If a collector is concerned that their client won't be happy about them using the platform, then it's very likely that their competitor who has the same client is already using the platform. That's something that we see pretty regularly, just saying it in a straightforward way.
Adam Parks (19:54)
Sure.
George Simons (19:54)
Right. And that's something that we see happening quite a bit. And we take compliance very seriously. So for example, like the consumer's PII is stored on the Solo app. The collector doesn't need to store that themselves. They're not at risk of having that information revealed. Like a data breach, it's kept securely on Solo. Solo is even SOC 2 compliant. So we have a SOC 2 certification. We treat our data with the highest standards. It's strongly encrypted both to the outside as well as to people internally within the company. And we are hitting all of the compliance benchmarks that we need to.
Adam Parks (20:34)
I would encourage everybody to go and take a look because it doesn't sound like there's any downside to a collector logging in and checking out the platform for themselves. It's not gonna cost them anything. There's no upfront fees. There's no ongoing fees if they decide that they like it and they wanna use it. I mean, is there really any reason that somebody should not just log in and go try the platform? Like go look at it, go check it out.
George Simons (20:59)
I'm not aware of any reasons not to go check it out. Go to solosuit.com slash collectors. You can log in even if you don't want to take any actions. You can just check it out. Take a look. Poke around.
Adam Parks (21:10)
I would highly suggest that people do that because you're missing out on what you don't know. And I think it's important that we continue to try and test and challenge new technology across the space. And this feels like a great opportunity to kind of reach in there and start to play around with something that could add some significant value. Now for the collector that is overly diligent prior to touching something, Are there opportunities or could they reach out to you to maybe see the world from the consumer perspective as well to maybe increase their level of comfort with the platform prior to logging in?
George Simons (21:45)
For sure, yeah, the best avenue there is to reach out to Yale Levy. He is a previous debt collector, He ran his own law firm, founded it from the ground up. Levy and Associates, he's a great debt collector. He even managed to sell his firm, which is an awesome story. I'd reach out to Yale at Yale @ solosuit.com. So that's Y-A-L-E, just like the school at solosuit.com. And he would be more than happy to do a demo of the software for you and answer any questions that you have.
Adam Parks (22:14)
I think that's a fantastic idea because the ability to go in there and understand it from two different perspectives and really get a feel for what is this platform and how does it create that bridge between two worlds. I've been lucky enough to see it from both sides and the reason I asked that kind of fixed question was because I did get to see it from the consumer side as well and I was pretty surprised at how easy it was to use and how simple everything was in the process between the two parties.
In looking at that, we'll also have the five minute pitch listed below as well. So you can go on and check out that demo for yourself when Yale kind of presented it to me through the five minute pitch series, which I was kind of excited to see because this is new and interesting technology. I feel like as an industry, we're always looking at things necessarily through the same lens and starting to look at things from the consumer's lens, I think can help us to broach some of the challenges that we've had as an industry in the past.
So being able to bring together and to kind of view things from the consumer's perspective and where you kind of started your entire business based on a challenge that you had and looking at it and saying, well, if I have this challenge in a room full of lawyers, how many other people in the general public are being faced with a challenge that they can't overcome because they don't have the same resources, technology, capabilities, and ultimately knowledge you were already in law school?
George Simons (23:18)
Okay.
Adam Parks (23:35)
So I'm kind of interested to see how this continues to unfold. What's your goal to kind of connect with this debt collection industry over the coming year? Like where do you see things continuing to evolve with your product set? Because I know you guys have new features and rollouts all the time, but like what's the future look like for you?
George Simons (23:48)
Thank you. Yeah, for us, we want to make it as easy as possible for collectors to collect the debts that are owed to them. And we have a great team of Yale and Stanford engineers working on the collectors dashboard every day. That's we refer to the main software that the collectors use when they log in. And we're working on things to make the collectors dashboard more efficient, more effective whether that's allowing the collectors to issue disclosures to a consumer more quickly in an automatic way, whether that's allowing them to see the collectability score on consumers, whether that's allowing them to generate their settlement agreements and settlement letters faster, doing all kinds of great things to make it easier for the collector.
Now on the consumer side, really, we think a lot about the consumer for sure as well, and we are finding new ways to increase the net worth of consumers. So really what we found with consumers is that we're taking people who are in a tight spot and we're helping them bounce back from rock bottom to positive net worth. And it's really a story that we see quite a bit is, you know, consumers I think people oftentimes outside the industry mistakenly think that consumers who are being sued for debt are just debt beats that are flat broke. That's not really the case, right? In order to get debt, you need to get credit. In order to get credit, you need to have money. so oftentimes consumers in this position are, you know, people who have income, oftentimes quite a high income, and then they like lose their job. Then they get their job back. Then they get sued for the debt or their in collections. We really want to take people, help them increase their solvency. right, instead of being insolvent, we want them to be solvent as they would like to be themselves. They want to pay back the money that they've borrowed and then help them even increase the positive net worth.
Adam Parks (25:50)
Well, George, it sounds like you guys are doing some great work over there, both for the consumer and the collector. I'm very excited to see how things continue to evolve with your organization, both from a education for the consumer standpoint, from a cash flow perspective of bridging the gap between everybody and, you know, having Yale on your team, I'm sure is giving you some incredible insights into what's happening on the debt collector side of the world. And clearly, you've got a lot of knowledge about what's going on in the consumers side and in kind of wearing those those glasses and that lens. So I do appreciate the work that you're doing and trying to bridge this gap. I realize it might feel like the Grand Canyon on some days that you're trying to cross. But in reality, I'm really glad that somebody's actively working on it.
George Simons (26:36)
Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you, Adam. I appreciate it.
Adam Parks (26:40)
Yeah, well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights today. It is valuable. For those of you that are watching, if you have any additional questions you'd like to ask George and 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. I'm willing to bet I can get George back here at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, George, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate all of your insights.
George Simons (27:05)
Thanks a lot.
Adam Parks (27:07)
And thank you everybody for watching. We'll see y'all again soon. Bye everyone.
