Inside the 2024 TransUnion Report | Key Debt Collection Insights & Predictions | Ep 208

Adam Parks (00:06)

Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. This is my personal favorite episode of the year. Last year you saw these two gentlemen, Manny Plasencia, Mark Naiman, joining me to talk about the TransUnion Debt Collection Industry Report. And I think this year's report is even better. I don't just say that as the author, I say that because I really believe in the volume of people that we got to participate.

what that sample size looked like this year and really some of the insights that we drew from it. So thank you gentlemen for joining me today. I really do appreciate it. For anyone who's not from the industry and hasn't had a chance to get to know you through the years, Manny, starting with you, can you give us the one minute Manny background? How'd you get to the seat that you're in today?

Manny Plasencia (00:50)

Yeah, thanks, Adam. I've been in the collections industry my whole life. You know, the significant role started at AmEx. I was director of operations at Latin American AmEx. I spent six years with them before jumping to the dark side, as we say, and joining the third party. Got to help some companies like URS, Altran, and ultimately Convergent before doing some stuff with FinTechs and Goldman Sachs. Lastly, before this appointment, which I'd to discuss here, I was with eBay.

head of global collections at eBay, and finally decided to make the jump and have now joined TransUnion. I'm on board at TransUnion. I know that's a little different than the last time we reviewed this report, and the irony of it is significant for me, but I have came on board. I'm head of third party collections at TransUnion and try to help our industry by providing products and data and everything that TransUnion does besides credit reporting to help support and drive our industry's growth.

I'm excited about this report. thank you and Mark so much for, I guess, the partnership with TransUnion and everything that you guys put into this report. It's so extensive. It really is. I'm so proud of the product that we're putting out together and agencies do with this information. Hopefully it'll guide some serious thought and strategy and, you know, our agency partners and friends will be able to deploy several parts of this report in the strategies.

Adam Parks (02:09)

I agree wholeheartedly. I think there's a lot for us to be able to fuel the discussions in 2025 with a better understanding of how the industry is changing and evolving. Mark, how about you for anyone who has not had an opportunity to meet you or has never attended a conference?

Mark Naiman (02:23)

Sure, hey, nice to

meet you out there in Webland people Mark Naiman I'm currently managing director of debt connection and in the park. We're a curated event management company. We've hosted two conferences which I was fortunate enough to take over in 2021. Prior to that, I had started a debt buying company still around today absolute resolutions corporation. And in that time,

I took all of the relationships, everything that I had built over the better part of 20 plus years and was able to push that forward into curated networking events that are coupled with what I call top notch edutaining material. And I've been lucky enough to have both you and Manny as speakers at my events because I really try to engage in discussion as a resident receivables management commentator, troublemaker. I love

invoking and being part of those discussions. And I think the Trans Junior Report does just that. You and I had a blast in hundreds of hours of us going what I like to call deep nerd on the results was a really eye-opening thing. And as Manny said, he's proud to see it in its current state. It's still a little surreal in some ways, especially considering the fact that

Mark Naiman (03:39)

The report itself was aggregated starting with what many suggested was a fake video in front of the Taj Mahal in June of 2024. So, you know, it's been a long time coming and while we've had to substantiate that we were there like the moon landing, it's been a fun road.

Adam Parks (03:46)

You

huh.

You know, it has been a long time since the drive from Jaipur to Agra where we were pouring through some of the information and data and building out an infrastructure that allowed us to do this into the future. And so I'm really excited even starting to talk about the 2025 report because I feel like I learned so much during this process and I feel like we're going to be able to hone in even more. so.

If you get nothing else from this report or from this discussion today, participate in 2025 because this is the source of truth that the debt collection industry has been looking for. This is the opportunity for us to have some facts and figures and statistics that we can actually rely on, whether it be from an advocacy effort, from a planning effort, as we're all learning as an industry. I think it's wildly important. Now, in the 2024 report, let me run through real quick what I learned from this report, because I think

This kind of sets the stage for our discussion today, but in looking at the data set behind it, and I wrote the report mostly to this topic is we're all expecting and have started to already experience this massive increase in the volume of accounts. Charge-offs are on the rise. And at the same time, like we've seen in other economic cycles, when charge-off rises, liquidation decreases. And at the same time, the collection agencies and law firms are also dealing with fee compression. So we've got this

pressure on the industry to do more with less. And so how can a debt collection company grow in scale in 2025? Well, they can look to hire more people in their offices, like we always has been the solution, right? But 88 % of companies are having trouble hiring and 81 % are having trouble retaining the people that they are hiring so that we know that we have these challenges, which means that if we want to staff up seats, we can go to BPO options and we've seen an increase in

BPO services with India being 240 % more likely to be used by the debt collection industry than other locations, but starting to look at how that has come into play. And then we start thinking about, what other options do we have to grow? Well, we can go into self-service technology. And we've seen this big growth in the use of AI technology and the exploring of AI technology because between 2023 and 2024,

40 % more companies are exploring artificial intelligence than were even willing to look at it last year. I count myself to be one of those people, because as we started looking at these mounds of data and analytics, beyond the Power BI dashboards and tools that we built, I needed to learn a new skill set to allow me to better understand the large data sets and what I could actually extract from it in terms of adding value. And I think this report is the summation of

really what I learned from that entire process because this has been an ongoing survey from May through, I think we ended it right around the beginning, end of August, know, spent about a month analyzing the data, spent a couple of weeks actually drafting the report and what you see is kind of that final outcome.

What were some of the things that stood out the most to you from the report? Like, where did you find surprises?

Manny Plasencia (07:04)

I won't call it a surprise, right? But I think the largest or the biggest message I found was that collection agencies are making significant investments in technology. They're enhancing agent productivity, improving margins and managing compliant risks by doing so, right? I think we saw 52 % of companies are investing in technology, right? And 18 % are investing specifically in AI or machine learning technologies, which is up like 11 % from the last time that we discussed this.

Huge jump. Now, I think we've had this discussion offline several times. We need to define AI in that broad brush and how it's being used in our industry. I think, you I appreciate the deep dive that you folks did because we discovered that 57 % of agencies, I think it was, were focused on segmenting accounts. Really important, right? Those decision trees, being able to automate those and how accounts are placed, whether it's, you know, propensity modeling or whatever, it's being taken over by...

Manny Plasencia (08:00)

AI, we can really rely on. Second was predictive payment outcomes, right? That was another 57%. We've, you know, have so much data and don't get me on my soapbox, especially now that I'm a trans union about how we can predict payment outcomes and, you know, use that in, in collection strategies. 56 % facilitating self-service and virtual negotiations, which is the part that excites me the most, right? Cause now we're getting to the real customer facing stuff and the things that, um, that are really going to, you know,

Manny Plasencia (08:30)

Take AI, and I hate to use the two bad initials, but take the current utilization of AI and expand it to what might become, right? Automated chat bots, the automated interactions, maybe even video, who knows where we're going with that. But I love seeing that level of detail in where those investments are going. And lastly, without really getting on my soapbox, I think a broader picture is, you know, while agencies...

Adam Parks (08:36)

and

Manny Plasencia (08:55)

especially larger agencies are able to take advantage of these to manage, you know, large language models, large data sets, as you're describing. Smaller agencies can really use the technological advances to really even the playing field and compete with the larger agencies in those specific labels, larger account volumes. know, no longer, as we've discussed, do we need as many people maybe to manage as many accounts? And I'm gonna get into the particulars of numbers and ACRs with all of our opinions.

But we can do so with less people and we can be more efficient and effective to manage through these larger volumes of inventory that we're expecting as you described, while being more efficient to carve through it and manage our margins, which is depleting significantly in the agency world. So that's what stood out the most to me.

Adam Parks (09:43)

So I find it interesting when we look at the 61 % of all debt collection companies actively using AI or ML technology are finding their investment to meet or exceed their expectations.

Manny Plasencia (09:54)

Isn't that wonderful?

Mark Naiman (09:55)

I was gonna jump in here because I think the interesting thing about this is that, especially with the way that we formatted these questions, I think that there's some use case that we simply did not capture and is something that definitely we would look towards a future survey to solve for. We really focused on the collections process, but I think that especially in the last six months, the number of alternate...

avenues of streamlining and utilization of creative prompt writing. And Manny, you mentioned it just a second ago. I think we're just scraping the surface and being able to compartmentalize some of these actual use cases. And back at DCS, I was very careful about pointing to use case examples because it's not just one thing. And there's such a host of difference between

Mark Naiman (10:43)

Look, of course, larger companies have more money. They can deploy money towards these very creative solutions. But especially in the last six to 12 months, the costs to deploy these internal type models are there is negligible. The wrong word, Adam. mean, is that I I I'm playing with one and it's, we're not at, you know, in no way, shape or form of my suggestion, you'll be able to implement a virtual AI chatbot.

Adam Parks (11:01)

You're on point.

Mark Naiman (11:11)

there's a thousand other use cases for that from payment predictability models to even inter office communications. It has kind of ingrained itself in many of these applications almost overnight. And so, that was the, the one thing that surprised me is that I think we, did a great job of capturing. think from a go forward perspective, we'll be able to even compartmentalize that further.

Adam Parks (11:35)

I think you're on point when it comes to the use cases because in my opinion, looking at the questions that we asked in 2024, the questions that we've already prepared for 2025, two of the things that I really want to dig into is the use cases for both the AI ML technology, but also for BPO services. Because I think there's a disconnect here. And when you look at the use of BPO services, it's very different across company types. And I'd like to dig in deeper to better understand how each company type is using it.

If I remember correctly, 73 % of debt buying companies are currently using BPO services, but I don't want to just lump BPO together as call center because it's not. It's back office participation. It's all of these different things. And I think that's where we really need to start to dig in in the 2024 questions to get a better understanding of not only who's using what, but to help us understand which of these

disciplines of debt collection, as I like to call them, is going to use these different technologies and resources for different purposes based on their business model, Law firms don't need seats, they need someone to help them process paperwork for lawsuits, Document redaction, all these other things that some of it can be done technically, but the exceptions still have to be managed, So we could buy all the best tech in the world, but we still have to manage our exceptions and then finding the people to actually fuel that.

And if we can't hire the people here, we have to look to those other resources. And BPO's growth, can be seen just looking over the last three or four years in terms of who's attended the RMAI conference, Three, four years ago, it was 99 % India, I think there was one or two groups that would be coming out of Latin or South America and maybe one that would come from the Philippines. Now this year, looking at the attendee list, it's a much...

broader perspective. There's a couple of groups coming from South Africa. There's groups coming in from Australia, other English speaking locations. And so I think we're going to continue to see this kind of growth pattern, but I really want to better understand the use cases and how different organizations are doing.

Manny Plasencia (13:37)

You just you just made the the you you just furthered my comment because I was going to say BPO became synonymous for a long time with offshoring. So if you thought BPO, you think offshoring, right? If think of the origination of BPO, it wasn't always like that. So that cost saving measure and focus through the staffing through BPO became very attractive for a long time. Technology, to your point, especially in back office functions, can now replace some of those

Manny Plasencia (14:06)

I guess BPO requirements, right? So a lot of folks are looking at it like, look, I could control my data. I'm keeping it on shore. Machines are doing it. So it's less risky and I have more opportunity to be able to manage that. That's one view, right? The other view that I've noticed is, you know, people, engagement, my customers, I have a different view lens in touch and how I can do that and how that's all being broken up in the customer journey by

Manny Plasencia (14:35)

you know, clients who hire BPO's and collection agencies in their strategies. It's just fascinating at this point, right? Cause I think that has a lot to do with, you know, the advent of worse. think, don't know if it was in this report, but, um, this one or another one, but we saw that, you know, we thought creditors are holding onto accounts longer than they were in previous years. And I assume me assuming I, you know, we got to be careful with these, right? With all these data quotes, but I'm assuming that technology is playing a major role in how

Manny Plasencia (15:04)

creditors are viewing the treatment of their accounts prior to the exhaustive efforts of placing or seeking third parties to help. And I think technology is playing a lot in how we're doing that from a back office perspective, support perspective, operations perspective. And although we've been leery now, as I was on my soapbox about last year, we're coming to the customer experience part, the customer facing part of what we're doing. We're becoming a little more comfortable with that. So yeah, I just wanted to add, think that's definitely

BPO and the fact that it's so synonymous with specifically offshoring might have a lot to do with how we see that play out in the report and in the near future.

Mark Naiman (15:41)

think that's shifted.

I think that's shifted a little bit. In fact, I can point to at least two or three evenings where Adam and I were arguing over the interpretation of what is BPO, right? Business Process Outdoor. And while I fully appreciate, it's your typical, you know, it's an outsource, I think the concept of it being near shore, offshore, has disappeared to some extent. I think that there are some people that consider as...

Adam Parks (15:51)

You

Mark Naiman (16:04)

As we went through the data, was one of the challenges, right? We have aggregated information of responses. We don't know who's responded what answer. And so we have to kind of determine clearly there's there's a greater interpretation of what BPO is, right? Outside of that dictionary definition. And so while some may consider accounts that they outsource a passive debt buyer outsourcing accounts to a third party specialty vendor as business process outsourcing versus true outsourcing or

Mark Naiman (16:33)

or an alternate office in a alternate location type BPO perspective. And we also heard several definitions that specifically said, look, that's third party. It has to be a third party. There's no first party BPO. As long as it's a third party and you're utilizing those individuals in that capacity, I think there's a definition. I mean, it goes back to the fact that there is no, as any collection attorney will tell you, there's a very limited number of defined terms with the

collection space and this is one of those reasons why it's really hard to hit that moving target sometimes.

Adam Parks (17:06)

But when you talk about the BPO here, right, almost two thirds, 64 % of debt collection companies agree that their companies need to diversify their business to survive or thrive in the long term. So we know that there's this need to diversify. And we've been able to break down on the report kind of how each one of the debt disciplines is ultimately approaching that diversification, right? Debt buyers are moving into judgments are moving into new geographic areas, as are the law firms, but then the collection agencies on the other hand,

Manny Plasencia (17:07)

Have a seat.

Adam Parks (17:34)

are moving into BPO call center services, right? Like customer service, customer support. I'm literally doing a webinar on it in the next couple of days, like specifically talking about it, because I find it to be interesting how that bridge starts to happen, right? From a diversification standpoint. So if we're thinking about diversifying and we're talking about these BPO services, that's definitely an area of growth, but does it become easier to staff a customer service call center than it does a debt collection call center?

Manny Plasencia (18:01)

So Convergent, I dealt with the blended environment. I was a collection agency and a BPO. We found some, at the beginning, some rudimentary ways to define the two, right? One inbound, one outbound, that kind of stuff. But eventually when it came down to understanding our client's needs, some of that was just creating our own need. Like think about, I'll use for an example, we had a product for Toyota, excessive wear usage and mileage, which was very white glove, early stage lease.

Manny Plasencia (18:27)

customers, is, they want these customers back returning customer kind of white gloves situation. So we were, we had created a collections customer service department to support our escalations and inbound complaint calls so that we can manage the entire project. One half late in my BPO space, the other half late on my collection space and my collection projects often created this BPO environment, right? BPO however, is

become that it's become, you know, early stage collections of it's become back office function. It's become support has become legal research has become asset management. It's become anything that, you know, quite frankly, you don't want to put your hands on or don't have the staff manpower to do so. the more automation that takes place, the more technology takes over. think the more BPO gets. You know, impacted or gets more niche, but manages these things at a different level. Just think about communications, right? If communication changes, email was up.

What was it? 6 % SMS and text was up 5 % and self-service portals were up 9 % in the report, right? So as that communication changes, do I really need the voice agent that I needed before? Now I could have a two-way digital agent that I can put in a BPO and I feel more comfortable with because I'm controlling the messaging, I'm approving what's going back and forth, and I'm no longer reliant on an agent who might have that human factor of doing something crazy in a country that I have no control in because they're

somebody else's employee. So as an operator, just communication is changing, might be changing the way I utilize BPO. And actually rather than contriting it, expanding it, because it's creating more comfort and more trust between the two organizations, especially in the processes that the communication is causing.

Adam Parks (19:59)

So as we looked at the report and we started talking, I 52 % of debt collection companies believe their technology investments are mainly driven by the increased need for agent productivity and to improve their margins, right? So they can see this fee compression, they can see they have to do more with less, and this is how they've been approaching the challenge. But when you talk about the rise of SMS and the rise of email, I find it to be...

kind of intuitive that it's going to follow a similar projection to self-service technology like the online consumer portal, because where else are you gonna send them? Can't take a payment through a text message, can't take really a payment through an email, you're generally just using these other communication methodologies to drive that consumer to a place in which you can engage with them. Now it's a digital self-service engagement in that instance, but I'm kind of not surprised to see those things move in conjunction.

I do also think that the move to email being greater than the move to text messaging is also related to the challenges in getting your shortcode approved. I have yet to see one of those go smoothly, right? I manage a lot of websites. I have yet to see one of those go like really smoothly without a whole bunch of back and forth. But it is a lot easier to send an e- like to just start cranking out emails than it is to start cranking out text messages and to manage

Manny Plasencia (21:09)

Yeah.

Adam Parks (21:21)

the content library and all the driving factors that go behind

Manny Plasencia (21:24)

I think email behavioral intelligence has improved dramatically. And because email behavior intelligence, we have several products here to you that do that, right? And because that has improved dramatically, I think that strategy has become a lot more profitable. look, I think it's a little more cost effective to send an email than it might be an SMS, than it might be a phone call, right? If we look at it in steps.

So think that might drive that maybe that 1 % variance that you're seeing in growth. don't know. I would make some assumptions, especially with our smaller partners. You know, we're trying to do the best they can to manage larger inventories. And I'm proud to see that they're using smart communication channels to call their payers, get the low hang of it, do whatever it is that they're doing in those strategies through these channels. I'm surprised still, I think we've talked about this for years now. I'm still surprised at the slow adoption.

of these communication channels, considering that they're the primary communication channels that society uses today. You know, I won't say that the phone is gone and is going away. I will never say that. I think the phone has a strong place, as the agent does, in our industry. I just think the way that our strategies need to work in comparison to the societal way that we communicate haven't evolved. You and I were speaking briefly on another

Manny Plasencia (22:40)

topic and in a post and I, something I'm passionate about. And I think that's the change with the driver of the change in these digital communications is content. We're trying to speak to people. Like we speak to them in letters in an SMS, you know, some of our text messages that I've seen are literally sound like, Hey, dummy, click here, pay me. You know, it's just, it's not, it's not engagement. And if we learned that it's about engagement, not about notification, then these digital channels will become much more viable.

Adam Parks (22:48)

Yeah.

Manny Plasencia (23:07)

to all of our agency partners. I press the, I urge the industry to really start diving into content and content libraries and learning how to speak to the appropriate demographic, whether it's behavioral or demographic data, whatever data you can acquire to put that content and message together and deliver the best message now with the best channel at the best time, at the best day. And all of those things that you're trying to achieve in your strategy, if you can do all of that together.

Yeah, content is going to be the driver because it's going to create the performance that they're looking for. And we've, you you've seen some of the stuff I've talked about. I could be on my soapbox for days.

Adam Parks (23:44)

Content is king.

Mark Naiman (23:45)

I'll point

out 60 % of respondents were either C level or owners. And I'm not gonna be presumptive in making this statement, but as a gray beard myself, I will tell you that I think some of that fear of adoption simply comes from

let's call it a technological evolutionary leap that I think takes place every few years where you have technologies that haven't been concrete tested. Voice over IP is a great example of this, right? 10 years ago, voiceover IP gets longer than that. It's 20 years. Voice over IP comes out and

The connections themselves are inconsistent. One out of four calls drops, one out of 10 calls drops, just because the bandwidth wasn't available in the streets. Within 10 years of that, there's fiber everywhere. AT &T owns a fiber network that stretches from one side of this country to the other, and all of a sudden, it's no longer an issue. I think the same thing's taking place.

by today's standards, the cost of AI has dropped for you to deploy something in a test, a sandbox environment, went from having to deploy a host of staff, a host of expense, and I think has been consolidated. And as we see that further consolidation, I think that the companies that have not adopted it, that perhaps have owners that are...

older or less likely to adopt new technology. I think that's a better way of putting it. I think that as it becomes more consumer facing, as they begin to take on newer employees, newer work relationships within a BPO context, all of a sudden you've got a redefinition of how we can better define each of these unique classifications that Manny had spoken of, right?

And it's moved beyond the conversational AI. As he said, having a voice bot on the phone by today's standards was something five or six years ago, kind of cutting edge, but does it lack that personality? These models could tell you way faster than a room of actuaries. That's my kind of closing comment on that AI topic. Yes, thank you. Thank you.

Adam Parks (25:36)

No, I

Manny Plasencia (25:53)

Thank

you.

Adam Parks (25:53)

think you're on point. And I think when you look at how the breakdown of the survey participants changed from 2023 to 2024, I think that also will play into some of the stats that we see in some of the year over year change that we see in term. mean, there's been some changes in the 2023 report had more smaller medical focused collection agencies that participated in this year. And I think

in part due to the amount of promotion and just specifically who we were promoting to, who our audience is, really did drive more debt buyers, more law firms, more creditors to actually step in and participate. And hopefully next year we can get even more engaged and involved to help us fill and fuel the discussions for 2026, because this is an opportunity for the industry to have a source of truth. we've...

We've seen a number of different attempts to collect this information through the years, and now there's a great methodology and mechanism by which we can collect this, try to understand it, and then fuel these discussions.

Manny Plasencia (26:53)

So I'll tell you, I want to partner with you guys on that opportunity. I think our industry needs exactly that. Now you hit on that, we've been doing this, I've been reviewing this report in one way or another as an operator for many years. Now that I'm on board at TU and I can have some decision or have some impact into what we do with this report. I'd really like to do exactly what you said, Adam. I'd like to partner with you to do everything that we can to be that singular source of truth, to help guide our industry and learn from our

industry, where are we going? What are we doing? What are the challenges that we have and how can we face them together? You know, of course, there's some self interest, right? TransUnion is a great organization that's been involved in and spearheading, you know, product development and strategies in the third party collection space for a long time. We do a lot more than credit reporting. Everybody knows that. But it's also an opportunity to be stewards of what we've been given. We've all been in this business a long time. I know we're all

evangelist and real proud of what our industry is doing. And we have the opportunity to really get collective and collaborate with the entire industry. And I challenge us all to do that. I'd love to do that. I'll tell you just one more thing before I get off my soapbox here. One statistic that I found, and I'm very proud of, which most people, especially to you, might not be, right? But there was a dramatic change in the number of collection agencies reporting to credit bureaus, specifically as an engagement tool.

Right. It's talking about the societal shift in thinking to me anyways. And I know people are going to tell me where there was more medical agency. I don't think that's the case. I think, you know, we're becoming aware that the stick isn't, isn't what we want to do. It's the carrot. And I think this technology, technological advances, ways that we're communicating more frictionless environments for customers to make payments, to interact with us more.

empathetic approaches in our strategies and more problem solving that we're doing is actually leading away from strategies of the past where credit reporting was an engagement tool, you know, the call me or else type or it's, you know, just think we're getting away from that. and while I didn't, you know, what I really appreciated was we didn't figure out specifically like what technologies people are buying because your research was really, you know, inquired on a broader, categories of solutions rather than specific products.

Manny Plasencia (29:06)

But that said, there was a clear trend towards analysis and automation, right? And I think those are gonna help us identify those trends or create those strategies that we were just talking about, which are much more empathetic than what we've seen in the past and much more personal and directly attached. So I'm glad to see that. And that one metric, if you would, was astonishing to me and led me to that.

Adam Parks (29:11)

When we talk about the technology and the AI and these other pieces, garbage in garbage out, right? If we fuel this, this technology with good data, we're going to be in a much different position in 2025 and into the future, because it's not just about, you know, putting a piece of technology in place, you have to feed the technology, your car doesn't go very far without gasoline. So you know, how are we going to find and address the data that needs to be fed into the machine?

Manny Plasencia (29:53)

Yeah.

In Adibet, I was very fortunate that all of my data, behavioral or not, all happened in one place. So everything I had was on my site and I could utilize that. I've learned that externally, whether it be a Goldman or other places, that's not the case. And especially when I'm trying to manage multiple portfolios, like our third party partners do, like I did a convergent, right?

Manny Plasencia (30:25)

One data set for group A might not work for group B and every portfolio has different nuances and behaviors. Where before, you know, balance, alphabet, region, age, that was enough for me to go after, you know, FICO score. That was enough for me to develop a strategy today with the abundance of information and the way that I could congruently stack it together and put it together to be able not just to develop contact, but intent and propensity and will and ability and all of these things. It just makes it so much more effective and efficient.

Manny Plasencia (30:53)

in the way that we can drive our technologies. I could sit on this soapbox forever, but technology isn't the only answer. It's knowing what data, to your point, if technology is the frontier, then data is the gold. And yeah, pick up lead, pick up gold, pick up 10 karat, pick up 24 karat. There's going to be a difference in data and how you utilize it. And it's very important that you, that's the hard part. That's the challenging part. And I think it was one of our VPs

that recently spoke about how digital strategy, where digital strategies fail, and that's usually where they fail, is in the data. What data are you utilizing? Because we could all send text messages. You know, if I send you a text message at three o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, on Super Bowl Sunday, I'm probably not going to get a favorable response. You know what I mean?

Adam Parks (31:40)

Yeah, I think that's exactly on point. And I look forward to seeing how much more of this actually plays out, right? We've seen a lot of the results that we've seen in this report start to play out over the last six months, and I expect to see it even more over the next six months. And I hope that we can get more engagement from, you know, from the trade associations and really dig more into the individual disciplines of debt collection, and how they're experiencing the results of this report.

because I think we know these results are being experienced now, but now how is that experience different and how are different disciplines reacting to the situation at hand? And I think that's an interesting discussion to be had, you know, throughout the year at the trade associations.

So for those of you that are watching, I'm sure that you have questions at this point. And if you haven't already read the report, shame on you. Go to tu.receivablesinfo.com and download your copy of the report today. Dig through it, ask us questions. We're here for a discussion. Granted, this is a one-time podcast, but Manny will be back, Mark will be back, we'll be at CRS, we'll be at all the shows throughout the year.

And we're happy to have these conversations. Just leave your comments here on LinkedIn and YouTube, and we'll be happy to respond to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see me discuss with these gentlemen, you can leave those in the comments below as well. And hopefully I can get them back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for great industry. But until next time, gentlemen, thank you so much for your time, attention, insights. I really do appreciate it.

Manny Plasencia (33:09)

Thank you, appreciate it. Appreciate being here.

Mark Naiman (33:09)

Thank you, Adam.

Adam Parks (33:12)

And for those of you that are watching, we'll see you all again soon. Bye, everybody.