Overcoming the Yelp Effect | Building Digital Trust in Debt Collection | Ep. 225

Adam Parks (00:06)

Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another episode of Receivables Podcast. Today I'm here with two gentlemen that you probably already know. I've got Mr. Chris Runci and Mr. Chris Murphy joining us with DebtLink. How you guys doing today?

Murph (00:21)

Good, Adam. Thanks for having us.

Chris Runci (00:23)

Thank you, Adam, for having us.

Adam Parks (00:23)

I really do

appreciate you guys coming on and spending some time with me today. I appreciate your insights. Today we're gonna talk about building digital trust and what does it mean to build trust in the debt collection marketplace, especially online in a B2B environment, in a B2C environment. It's just such a unique thing. We live in such a unique world that I think it's important that we address some of those methodologies, some of the places where we can start to build some of that digital trust.

and what that looks like in our unique world. But before we jump into that, starting with you, Mr. Runci, could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?

Chris Runci (01:02)

Sure, thanks Adam. So I started in this business 30 years ago on the brokerage side. I worked for a firm that brokered mortgage servicing rights. It morphed into performing loans and charged off debt. I worked for a few other companies before starting my own brokerage firm 22 years ago now and have been fortunate, very fortunate over the years to meet a lot of great people, including Mr. Murphy. And we came together a couple of years ago

to start on DebtLink

Adam Parks (01:30)

Excellent, Mr. Murphy, how about your background?

Murph (01:32)

Well, I'm older

than Runci. So I started out mainly in the agency side of the world, receivables venture, mainly on the agency and sales side. And so for most of my career, I worked for a number of the large players in the space, head of sales, running sales. And I ran into Mr. Runci 20 plus years ago when I was tasked with launching a debt buying division within the firm I worked for at the time. And I hired Chris as a

as a consultant to help me do that. And clearly he didn't screw it up. No, I'm kidding. He did a great job. And so when I left there, my next place asked us to do the same thing and I partnered with Chris again. So we've had a long standing relationship, but the majority of my life has been on the sales side of the agency side of the world. So that's been my background.

Adam Parks (02:19)

So you guys are coming with a debt buyer and a debt collection experience in your background, which I think really plays well into today's discussion. But now you've also got the DebtLink organization now. And let's talk about that. What do you do at DebtLink and what's the value proposition to the industry?

Murph (02:36)

Well, jump in quick, so DebtLink came from Chris really, his idea, but I had an experience on the agency side. I worked for a firm that started with the letter A and I used to get requests for information all the time, not because they knew anything about me, but I was an A. So I was high on that alpha list. And after asking them a little bit about what they did and did what we all do as a qualifying, I would find nine out of 10 times they were not fit for us. And so instead of just hanging up.

I'd say, well, here, tell me more about what you do. And then I'd start to explain to them where to find a resource. And it wasn't easy. So that was my experience. And Chris had something different, but that's what led us together. Chris, talk about coming out of COVID.

Nope, we lost him. Well, he'll come back in. But Chris's experience coming out of COVID, he was looking for agencies to help with his clients and found that the only thing that was out there was an alphabetized list and thought there could, there has to be a better way. So he teamed up with his son who was out, you know, because of COVID was home and they built the preliminary framework for DebtLink.

Murph (03:39)

reached out to me and we partnered to come along when he explained what it was, I thought a great fit. And our initial mission was how do we create a directory that would allow people to find resources and especially if you were looking for an agency, an attorney, a debt buyer, seller, and actually filter it to one that best fits what you need. are you a, do you have, is the bad debt you're dealing with, is it auto loans and you're looking for a collection agency can collect that?

or are you a commercial firm that need to commercial debt? You know, finding an agency, and it really kind of goes along with what we're talking about here in terms of digital trust, but how do you connect the right strategic service partner to the firm? And the firm would be the service, you know, the provider of goods or services that has clients. How do you connect the right strategic service partner to them? And that was the original where DebtLink came from.

Adam Parks (04:33)

I think you guys are on point when it comes to building that digital trust, because there's the first thing about building trust is talking to the right people and not wasting a whole bunch of time having these conversations that are not going to add value. So being able to filter down and identify who's working on auto paper, who's working on secured consumer loans, who's working credit card and being able to find the right organizations that actually fit the needs and experience of your business. And I think that connection is one of the ways in which digital trust is ultimately

built. Like that's a major factor of being able to get to the right people.

Murph (05:07)

You already know that, you you're talking to a company and a red flag that pops up when you ask them, what are they good at? If they're good at everything, that's a little scary. if I'm looking, you know, what we also know in our experience, my experience in the agency world, firms that have experience collecting in a certain space or specific, we would call it specialty or niche, they have an experience for a reason and they're good at it. And so if you can align yourself with somebody that has that experience.

Generally speaking, your results are going to be better.

Adam Parks (05:39)

Agreed and I think finding those people has always been difficult because there is no real way place to do that. So you can you can go to all these conferences and unless you're out there actually talking to the people and writing that information down, it's really hard to figure out who's the best at auto loans between three and $7,000 average balance and

Murph (05:55)

Yeah, it's

interesting as you talk about building virtual trust, things have changed. Again, we laugh about how I laugh about how long I've been in this space. You're still a rookie, relatively speaking. I mean, back in the day, as you called on firms, did. I I did. was send emails, send paper letters, make phone calls, do whatever you had to do to get somebody to answer the phone.

Adam Parks (06:06)

Fair.

Murph (06:18)

When I first started, caller ID really wasn't a big thing then. But you realize there was a gatekeeper. So how do you get past that? And then how'd you get 30 seconds to get somebody to agree to see you? And then at that point, if they would agree, you'd book that appointment and not hang up, because that appointment's booked for next week. And the next hour, two hours, five hours, I'd book, look for every other prospect I had in that general market, cluster book, and then jump on a plane and fly. That's what we used to do.

Murph (06:48)

Well, part of that's still the same today. Companies are trying to connect with somebody to give them 30 seconds to explain a little bit about what they do to see if that prospect's willing to give them engagement time to demonstrate. The demonstrations now for the most part are virtual. But one thing that has changed dramatically, nobody buys anything today without reading a review and doing their digital research.

Murph (07:17)

or knowing that they're going to be questioned about did they do that. And that's huge. you know, I was on a call before this podcast where that was exactly what the client was talking to me about is that they're frustrated that people are doing that how they are doing that digital recon. And so how do they put that best foot forward to really establish the trust in that space? That was big. So I think that's a challenge that a lot of companies are dealing with. We're trying to figure out ways to help.

support and allow them to put that best foot forward.

Adam Parks (07:49)

First thing you do when you hear a new company name is go to Google, you type in that company name, and what are going to see? And depending on your knowledge of the debt collection industry, you may not be comfortable with all the negativity that you see when you're trying to hire a collection agency. And it doesn't have to be all negative, but it often is driven from negativity. When you go and you search for a collection agency name on Google, quite often you're going to or debt buyer, you're quite often going to find this negativity.

Consumer attorneys suggesting that you sue this debt collector rather than pay them, which I think is ambulance chasing, but that's another story. But how do you then, yeah, and so I digress, but how do you then start to weed through who the good organizations are? Because the reality is some of the best organizations in the space and having written policy and procedure, having audited hundreds of firms across the space,

Murph (08:26)

Yeah, we digress, right?

Adam Parks (08:43)

I know that some of the best well-run firms in the space have had terrible online reputations. So how do you then start to separate from this consumer B2C negativity? Because nobody loves a debt collector and it's only over the last couple of years that we've actually been able to actively engage with the consumers through online means to start generating positive reviews. And you can look at Spire Recovery, you can look at InDebted and a number of other companies.

Central Portfolio Control that have thousands of five star reviews, but they actively put the time, energy and effort into doing that. It's expensive, it's time consuming, like there's a process to that. So how do we then start to separate this B2C negativity from the B2B realities of working with a debt collection company?

Murph (09:30)

Yeah, it's interesting that, and it really is important when you're talking about digital trust, how to separate the B2B versus B2C. And so there are those firms that are, they're looking for positive response from in the B2B context in how they treated the debtor. And they're trying to get positive there because they are trying to influence the other debtors that they're connecting with to positively respond to them. So there's a means to an end there.

But from a B2B sales perspective, Google reviews is not a safe place in the receivables industry. It's just not. And so you deal with a challenge of how do I satisfy the need for this shopper to get the warm and fuzzies without risking alienating them on unfair B2C in the mix? And that's really, we call it the Yelp effect because quite frankly, it really sort of developed through the use of Yelp.

Murph (10:26)

I've

used this example before. You're going to go shop for a restaurant. You go to their website because you want to read their menu a little bit. And they have a review on their website. But we all know nobody puts a bad review on their own website. So you'll read through it. And if it looks good, you're eventually going to migrate to Yelp to read what those reviews are and why. Well, that's a third party site. And those are viewed given much greater weight. so that was really, we started to think about it.

Murph (10:51)

And so when we built DebtLink, again, the first thing was it was going to be a fancy yellow pages for collection agency, collection attorney, and debt buyers or sellers that could be filtered. And that's great. But before we went live, some of the old timers that came into the industry when I did and we were showing them what we were doing, they said, well, wait a minute. What about skip tracing? What about payment processing? What about all the other types of services that all operate in our space? And so it grew.

Murph (11:19)

And all those are now encompassed, so it's comprehensive. But the real comp, we were like, OK, so now we have everybody that plays here. What's the next step? Well, we went from being a fancy Yellow Pages to a 24 hour 365 trade show where people can wander down the digital aisle, research these different firms. They can go to one place to find what you would find at RMAI or ACA or CRS.

All the many of the same, not all, but many of the same players, most of the same players, but you can now have the time, eliminate the awkward avoidance of eye contact and just look and do that bit of a research. And then when you find a firm that, wow, these guys, didn't know what they did. This is exactly what I'm looking for. You can research it. You can look a little bit more. Then what we added was the ability to read third party reviews. And those are reviews that are put on.

Murph (12:12)

from outside other businesses that have used that service. That's been a game changer. And I would love to say I'm smart enough and brilliant enough to have come up with the concept, but it really came from one of our subscribers that came to us and said, this is how we're using it. And it's been incredibly effective. And of course, from there, we glommed onto that and now have shared it with all of our other subscribers. So it's been really great to be able to see companies drive people to the site to read the reviews.

that they've been able to acquire from their existing customer base. It's been really, really effective. I mean, what we're looking at in the world of sales today, and that's what I think sales companies, companies that are selling their product or service have to understand.

You have a great idea. Well, I talked with a client today that does automated notary. It's a huge problem in the world of debt buying, in the broker world, and from creditors selling their portfolios to new ones. That notary subject is a very costly, time consuming. They have this great product that most people wouldn't know about. Even if they had a booth at a trade show, how many people are walking down that trade show aisle really not

Murph (13:21)

wanting to make eye contact, or maybe that's not even the decision maker. Most likely it's not. They're the recon person for that firm. Now they can find out more about them in this space. So having that, so what we talk about when we talk to companies are what's your digital footprint look like? What's the message are you sending? it, know, and again, I come, I'm an old school agency guy. Most of this industry was very,

Adam Parks (13:26)

Sure.

Murph (13:50)

resistant to change. I'll say it nicely. You know, it's the grandfather started it and the father ran it. Now he's turning it over to the next one and they've done the same thing with the same way for this long time. And you can often tell. And so I think companies are getting much smarter at understanding how to create their what they look like from a digital perspective.

Adam Parks (13:53)

That's an understatement of the century, but sure.

Murph (14:15)

And then our goal is really what can we do to influence shoppers to go to a platform and shop for everything they might need in the back office world, whether it's things that have already referenced. know, again, our first stop was collection agencies, collection attorneys. How do they differ? And why would somebody look at one versus the other? Debt buyers. So we're not...

and then we go into skip tracing and payment processing and BPO firms and specialty lenders and insurance and compliance. Again, it's all there. And most of the people that visit our site don't look at one thing. look at average. I laugh. When we started this 2022, coming out of COVID, Chris and I built it. And I remember us celebrating when we had 100 people visit the site in a month. I was like, it was big time, you know,

you know, who goes to a website when you first build the website, right? And so that was, and so now three and a half years later, and at that time, again, the first six months of our existence, I'm calling all the people that I knew within the industry, I came into the industry with, many of them are senior guys in their respective companies. And I basically, you know, I begged and I just said, dude, you gotta come on. And most of them laughed, okay, I'll do it.

Adam Parks (15:14)

Yeah, understood.

Murph (15:38)

Well, now let's fast forward three and a half years later. This month, I was checking my Google Analytics today because I was on another call. I've had over 1,600 visitors to the site in the last 30 days. So 1,600 individual people have come to DebtLink and shopped around. And during that period of time, they've looked at 3.27 pages, or little over three pages per. So they're not just coming in to look at one thing. They're shopping around.

There's most people when they, and you know this, you're a marketing guy or former marketing guy. I don't know. But you know, most people when they go to a website, stay on there for usually 20, 30 seconds at the most. We're averaging close to two minutes. So our length of engagement is pretty long. So that's exciting to us to see how that has changed. So now we're at a point where

Adam Parks (16:10)

I still do marketing.

Murph (16:31)

more and more people exponentially are going to DebtLink to connect, to read reviews, to do that research. They're in a place where you can read content that's produced by that client. So it's sort of a combination between LinkedIn and a website, just a little bit easier to manipulate when you need to, that then has added, layer on top of that is the ability to have third party reviews. And that's been a big thing. from our view in the world of digital and how to...

augment what you do. We think that we've tried to solve a big piece of that problem. And we continue to add things every month, whether it be webinar ability to have people really talk about how partners can interact together to better serve the firm and then going back to the original description. So anyway, I ramble. You can tell I get excited.

Adam Parks (17:21)

No, it's good.

I feel like that's a I feel like the businesses that you're doing business with right like those that are using a collection agency are more likely to leave a review on a site like yours, then they would be on Google or something else where they feel like they're swimming against the tide. Because if somebody's got 500 negative reviews, you want to be the only positive one on there. Right? Like it's nobody wants to swim against the tide like that and providing a new place that

you can actually leave an honest review and doesn't always have to be five stars. And I'd be interested in seeing the bell curve of, you know, review levels, right? Like how many stars are they? Are they ultimately saying each organization is worth? But I find that to be interesting. And I think that there's providing a place for people to have that conversation is half the battle, because there isn't a place now that they can go and have this kind of honest conversation because you can't do it at a

Murph (17:57)

Right.

Adam Parks (18:14)

trade association or something like that, because that's anti-competitive. It's not really something you do on a new site like ours. It's, think this is a great location for people to be able to have those types of, of discussions and to capture that type of information and include it. Because it is a mission critical function when it comes to what is a debt collector, why are debt collection agencies exist? All of those things. I think that there's a, we are a necessary

part of the credit ecosystem. And where can we have a true and honest discussion because people don't, the general public does not view us as the group of people keeping interest rates low or the group of people that's helping to maintain the availability of credit. And especially now as credit is starting to tighten, underwriting standards are rising, especially in FinTech. They would give a loan to anybody with a pulse three years ago, but today it's a very different animal.

So facilitating or creating a place to facilitate those discussions is mission critical as an industry that we need an open forum to have these types of talks.

Murph (19:24)

So for a guy that's been around as long as I have, one thing hasn't changed. All the time I was running sales organizations, we would do everything. We did trade shows. We did mailers. We had a sales team. We did everything you can imagine. And still on a daily basis, we ran into somebody we were trying to sell who would say, my gosh, I never knew about you. We'd only been around for 50 years. So that still happened. It was maddening. So what else could we do? So that was a challenge to me.

As I look at what we do, and again, somebody who's, and I know the guy, some of the men and women that have been in the industry 30, 40 years has seen this before where credit granting was loose and went crazy. And then we hit a tough patch and the economy slowed down and all the people that got credit that shouldn't have had it, you know, had problems or the people that got overextended and we go through these waves.

So as I'm sitting, and I remember when it hit the first time, it was new to me and I'm like, my gosh, look what's going on. And I'm sitting here watching it again going, I've seen this before. And so we know there is a wave and what we also know is that there are all these collection managers and controllers and CFOs that are maybe in their 30s and 40s. And when it happened in the first, they haven't seen some of what they're about to see before.

Adam Parks (20:25)

Yeah.

Murph (20:48)

And so right now what we know is that they're going to need to start searching for solutions because what's going to happen, all these businesses, happens every six, it's a cyclical thing. All of a sudden each of their aging buckets starts to grow and they're 120 plus, want it, it starts to get crazy. And then the CFO will come in and say, why is this 120 so big? And so the collection manager takes all the resources off where they should be and puts them where they shouldn't be.

to try to drive down an older bucket and the pressure is going to mount. How do I find a problem? How do I find a problem solver? How do I solve this problem? And so we're really trying to build something that we can market outside our industry bubble to all of those people so they know where to go to find them. And in the same respect, again, a guy that's been around as long as I have, still, every week,

Murph (21:44)

meet with another firm who were onboarding onto DebtLink that I'm learning about what they did or what they do. In the last week, we've onboarded a high level AI firm and this notary automation firm.

And it was incredibly interesting to me as I'm going through and asking them what they do, how they do it. And this one, the AI firm Cedric is going through their demo showing me what they can do. And it was, I thought back from the days when I was in debt buying, I shouldn't have sold any of that stuff. I'd be killing it right now. So their tools and technology is just amazing. So things like that excite me.

Adam Parks (22:09)

I'm familiar with the product, yeah.

Murph (22:23)

And I'm glad that companies can go to a place, do that research on a third party site, and really get a feel where they're not being overly sold. can just the facts, ma'am, and then go and choose to engage from there. And that's, to me, really exciting. And so as we talk about trust, how do we do what we do? We're looking at

How can a shopper who we know is going to do digital research do it in a centralized place? Check all the boxes on products, service, video, review, do the whole, see everything. And also maybe have cross connections and see that this firm is working with these guys and these guys and both can help me do a better job when they work together. So there's a lot of stuff going on that we think we can facilitate.

Murph (23:11)

So it's an exciting thing.

Adam Parks (23:13)

I think we're going to see more creditors that are scrambling to find solutions in the not too distant future. We're looking at an increase in the volume of an increase in the volume of accounts that are falling into the space. If you look at the 2024 TransUnion Debt Collection Industry Report, we identify like 90 % of debt collection companies are expecting an increase this year in the volume of accounts that they're seeing and originations are at an all time high, especially in bank card. So we're looking at you know,

not so much in unsecured consumer loans, because I feel like the credit availability is being squeezed. But the charge off volumes are going through the roof. I recently ran a linear regression analysis from 2021 through 2024, trying to predict out to 2030, even with a 20 % margin of error, we're talking about massive increases in the volume of accounts, which means that networks are going to have to expand and they're going to have to expand. And you can't hire more people right now. So now what?

Murph (24:07)

we see other things that happen that are.

Yeah, the volumes will increase. And another thing that will impact the market that's really cool. When I say cool, don't mean it a good, I mean, it's an interesting way to look at that. But, you know, how the population age groups, their perspective on things change. We found for a long time where that, you know, 18 to 25 year old, they didn't care about credit reporting. They didn't care. They didn't think it bothered them.

Adam Parks (24:19)

Yeah, an interesting dynamic.

Murph (24:37)

Then they hit over 25, 27, they started to become first time home buyers and realized credit score does have a financial impact. And now we got to figure out how to fix that. so there's, you know, these types of things are going to happen. We've seen it before is that these cyclical adjustments to different generations will begin to impact what we do. Again, having somebody that having a place that can service that. But as I think about again,

Stuff that I have seen and as we watch, understanding how cyclical our year is in the receivables management space and understanding number of collection days per month and each month. why is October always so good? You know, well, because July, what happened in July, Fourth of July, first week of the month, everybody's invoicing gets off. And so it throws off. And we already know when the cyclical

Adam Parks (25:18)

Yeah.

Murph (25:36)

invoice gets out of whack, delinquencies go up. Well, they go up September 30 days, the next month they get rolled over, go to collections in October. Most of them are not bad debtors, so they get touched once and they pay. So again, understanding the cyclical nature of our industry, understanding how the generational changes happen, I think are important for any service provider to understand and then have a place where this stuff can be found.

Murph (26:04)

I'm getting into a rabbit hole and things like that, but.

Adam Parks (26:06)

No, it's a really interesting conversation, Chris, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insights with me today, because I think building digital trust is something that you have been very focused on for the last couple of years. And as someone who understands the industry and the ins and outs of being a debt collector and what that relationship between the collections operation and the creditor operations really looks like in a realistic way is

is important. It's a mission critical item right now as we're trying to manage ourselves as an industry and looking for opportunities to move faster, to identify the right people that we should be talking to to make sure that we're optimizing the value of the accounts at hand. Because that's the challenge right now is the volume of the volume of accounts increases, the liquidation of those accounts generally decreases, which means that we have to find ways to do more with less whether that's through

artificial intelligence vendors, whether that's through, you know, recruiting or BPO services or whatever the case may be, you know, there's a couple of different areas where growth is still sustained in 2025. And it sounds like you're providing a marketplace for people to actually identify those types of organizations from a shopping perspective, and actually be able to go out there. I hate to, I hate to underplay it and call it e commerce, but it's the same kind of an idea, you're applying some of those e commerce style.

techniques to build digital trust in a B2B environment and facilitate the discussions that drive this industry forward. And I appreciate you for that.

Murph (27:35)

If I bowled it down to one thing, I'd say I'm trying to eliminate the pet peeves I've always had. I want to be able to cleanly. I want to be able to ask questions. If I decide I want to engage with a firm, I want to do it quickly. I don't want to have to make a dozen calls. I want to connect right to who I want to connect with. I don't want to move forward. And those are things that we're trying to solve is to have somebody who can find a solution, do the research, decide to connect, and connect quickly, cleanly, privately.

Adam Parks (27:40)

Yeah.

Murph (28:04)

Those are all things that were kind of mission critical to me personally. And I know I kind of apply the average man's concept to my, know, if it bugs me, I know it bugs others. So how do I solve that problem? That's large part of what we're doing. So I appreciate you giving us the opportunity to talk about it. I think it's a huge and those that are ahead of the curve that understand that, you know, this whole concept of how people shop today and make buying decisions and how that may have changed 20 over 20 over the last 20 years.

Murph (28:33)

I think they're getting ahead of the game. And so this is self-serving to you. know you guys have done a phenomenal job helping companies really straighten out their digital image. We're trying to create a platform that allows them to place that somewhere and for somebody to find it quickly and easily and in a logical way. And that's really what we're all about. So I'm excited about what we're doing. I appreciate you and what you do and love the opportunity to actually share this with others.

Murph (28:59)

Being an old guy, it's fun to be able to come and give a perspective.

Adam Parks (29:02)

Fair. Look, I appreciate the insights and experience Chris, you always make for an interesting conversation. And for anyone who hasn't seen it, definitely go check out the conversation that I had with Santa back in December. You might recognize some folks there as well. But thank you, everybody. Thank you, Chris, for coming on and sharing your insights with me today. For those of that are watching, you have additional questions you'd like to ask Murphy or myself, you can leave those in the comments and LinkedIn and YouTube, or you can leave comments for Chris Runci too.

who I'm sure will be checking those later after he lost power. Hey, that's what happens when you're in Florida. Sometimes we lose power. That's all I can say. But if you have additional questions or comments, you'd like to leave those in the comments, 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 as well. And hopefully I can get these gentlemen back at least one more time to help me continue to create great content for a great industry. But until next time, Mr. Murphy.

Murph (29:31)

He texted while we were on. His power went out where he was. And he's freaking out.

Ha ha!

Adam Parks (29:57)

Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate your insights. And thank you everybody for watching today. We appreciate your time and attention. We'll see you all again soon. Bye.

Murph (29:58)

Thanks Adam, great seeing you again.