Owning the Debt Collection Lifecycle :  Our Investment in re:ceeve

COVID-19 means more loans than ever are not being repaid

Selling a product to customers is hard work, but ensuring that 100% of those customers pay you back is usually a bigger challenge. In the aftermath of COVID-19, a collections crisis is looming on the horizon. In an intermediate scenario, non-performing loans (NPLs) will increase by about €216bn just in Europe. More businesses than ever before are becoming insolvent and the reverberations are being felt by everyone.

Enter the debt collection industry.

Outsourcing of debt collection puts customer relations at risk 

There are many terms for what many companies have outsourced over the years - “debt solutions” to “receivables management,” occasionally “debt resolution,” or even “pre-delinquent servicing.” Debt collection agencies (DCAs) that maximize for late fees are taking over. Moreover, customers are often treated with aggressive and intimidating techniques to recover on overdue debt. Companies that have outsourced lose any ability to steer the customer experience and can more or less presume that that customer will be lost.

Debt collection process has not changed in decades

Today, debt collection operations remain very manual and archaic. For decades, little in the industry has been automated and digitized as profitability has remained high. Phone calls, letters and voice mails are still used in the vast majority of cases to collect outstanding balances. But these channels provide very low response rates the times of mobile-first, digital communication.

Consumers have been crying for a more transparent approach that also encourages them to pay back on time. re:ceeve has stepped in to fill this gap.

Leveraging tech and behavioral science to make repayment less painful

re:ceeve is turning the current way of collecting money upside down. It offers a cloud-native platform that enables in-house collections and recovery teams to take a no-code, digital-first approach to resolving overdue claims while supporting customer control and experience.

With the help of AI, gamification and chatbots, re:ceeve tailors your debt collection strategy by: 

1. Offering repayment options that are suited to the debtor, such as by card or in payment plans.
2. Reaching customers preferred channels such as emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.
3. Leveraging behavioral segmentation to nudge repayment with the right message at the right time.

Companies thereby remain in full control of your debt collection process the entire time.

The numbers don’t lie

The results are a game changer: Improved cash flow, increased customer loyalty and reduced costs. With its first customer, re:ceeve created an increase in recoveries in excess of 30% in the first 14 days and a reduction of 68% in outbound calls.

Accelerating re:ceeve’s funding trajectory

We at Speedinvest invested in re:ceeve’s seed round in early 2020. We truly believe in the ability of founders Paul Jozefak and Michael Backes to disrupt the debt collection industry. An exceptional team in building technology companies with a deep understanding of collections. Since we invested, re:ceeve is continuously signing big company names and is already processing hundreds of thousands of claims monthly in 12 countries.

We are also excited to welcome Seaya on board! Together, we have increased re:ceeve’s seed funding to $13.5m within a year to build a category leader in the collection space!

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