3-Fold Revenue Growth of a Debt Recovery Agency
Revenue grew from £5 million to £15 million in a few years
22% collections increase with 12% costs reduction
Complaints reduced by 22%
The Story
CDER Group is one of the leading debt collection and enforcement agencies in the UK. The company was founded in 2004 and by 2010 its turnover exceeded £5 million. However, further growth of the company was limited due to its legacy IT infrastructure. CDER Group used an industry-standard debt enforcement solution, based on aging technology that required high levels of manual intervention and did not provide sufficient transparency to support the company’s needs.
In particular, it was almost impossible to understand what was happening "in the field" in terms of agent activity, scheduling, records of collections and financial arrangements with debtors. Despite CDER having a long list of potential improvements to the technology, because the platform was also used by multiple other bailiff companies, any enhancements that CDER suggested would be shared with their rivals, rather than driving their own competitive advantage.
CDER concluded that only a custom-built system would enable them to invest in a technology platform that would create business value and bring growth through delivering both efficiency and competitive advantage.
Haulmont business analysts conducted a complete analysis of the current business processes to draft a specification for the new system, to be known as "Hito Edge", with development start in July 2010. The first release of Hito Edge was launched in March 2011. In 2016, just five years after the Edge launch, Outsourcing Inc purchased CDER Group in a deal that valued the company at £24 million.
How This Was Achieved
Hito Edge was implemented via parallel running alongside the legacy system to minimize risk for critical business processes.
Hito Edge utilizes a propensity-driven scoring system, as well as a highly advanced dynamic allocation engine that plans agent schedules and automatically prioritizes next day planning against real-time events. All payments, fees, commissions, remittance and invoicing are managed with Hito Edge, and the agents' smartphone app enables full transparency of workflows and compliance with regulations and contractual SLAs.
It is no exaggeration to say that Hito Edge revolutionized the debt enforcement industry with its unique customer-centric view of cases and their associated data. By focusing on the individual, the platform enables the linking of cases relating to the same customer. This ensures a more efficient process for making calls and visits, and provides users with a clearer view of the relationships between cases and customers – as well as specific data relating to individuals.
CDER were able to leverage their investment into Hito Edge to increase the valuation of their operation far above the industry norms, both in terms of the solution being a unique asset to the business, and also due to its unmatched ability to scale for future business growth.
Today CDER Group revenues are reported at £15 million per year, three times larger than when the project began. Over the same period that they scaled by 300%, CDER report that complaints have reduced by 22%.
In the two years following go-live, the company experienced a 22% increase in collections for its clients at the same time delivering a 12% reduction in direct costs due to utilizing office and field-based staff more intelligently and improving automation.
