Three cost-saving benefits to outsourcing collections

by: Mark Damon

Most businesses, financial institutions included, are always looking for ways to save money on basic operational costs. The goal is to run a lean and mean operation, right? Efficiency is the name of the game when you want to keep your shareholders—your members, in some cases—happy and, ultimately, pass on those cost savings to them in the form of lower loan interest rates and higher deposit account interest rates.

When it comes to collections, cutting costs can seem like an impossible feat when you have limited resources in staff, time, and technology. After all, there are only eight hours in the workday, and your collectors likely have a difficult time reaching delinquent borrowers during typical working hours.

Sure, you could have your collectors make calls after hours and on weekends to increase contact rates, but that would derail you from reducing operations costs as you’d be forced to pay your employees for overtime or differential shifts, and/or would have the added overhead cost of keeping your branch(es) open for longer hours.

Aside from the actual monetary costs of in-house collections (i.e. employee salaries), there is also the opportunity cost that comes from lost productivity. Are there other functions that your employees could be focusing on to increase revenue and improve customer relations in place of time-consuming back-office functions like collections?

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