Articles by Sean Murray

Borrower Didn’t Make Their Payment? Maybe They Just Forgot

When borrowers gets squeezed, who will they pay first? According to a survey conducted by Lexop, American respondents ranked mortgage and rent payments as having the highest priority among recurring bills. Utilities (water, electricity, and gas) came second, car loans third, phone/internet bills fourth, and personal loan payments dead last. That may not be what lenders want to hear but the information could prove helpful in preparing for an economic downturn.

Notably, a missed payment may not even be a sign of financial stress. According to the same Lexop survey, 34% of respondents stated that the primary reason they had for being late on a bill was that they simply forgot. A majority also disclosed that they were late in paying because of other non-financial issues like invoicing errors, not having access to the bill, payment method issues, and more.

These seem like addressable issues especially since 35% of respondents wanted digital reminders via text or email. Less than 10% preferred they be reminded via phone call or snail mail.

“Empowering consumers to work with collectors toward meeting their payment goals is the best way to foster healthier business-customer relationships that will ultimately result in increased debt recovery and customer retention,” said Amir Tajkarimi, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Lexop, in a published statement related to the findings. Tajkarimi was a panelist on The Need for Speed in Payment & Collection at the Canadian Lenders Summit in Toronto this week. There, he explained that his firm was hyper focused on improving the collections user experience and emphasized that a missed payment is not always the result of a borrower not having the resources to pay.

The data revealed from the study is timely since 60% of respondents also shared that they were concerned about their ability to pay bills over the next 6 months.

Think You’re Good at Closing Deals in the US? Apply Your Skills in the UK or Australia

Think you’re well-versed in the SMB finance business? You might want to take advantage of a fast pass being offered to replicate your success in the UK or Australia.

The opportunity stems from a proposal posted on LinkedIn by Capify CEO David Goldin. Goldin’s got two decades of experience in the business itself and 14 specifically in the UK/Australian markets. Now he’s looking to personally select a handful of brokers and/or small funding companies and guide them on expanding their business overseas.

But why?

Goldin believes that US operators could bring a certain dynamic lacking in the other markets, complete dedication to a single product where there is a lot of opportunity. “There’s very few MCA shops there,” he said. “Very few of them that are MCA-only companies.”

And so the dedicated MCA broker shop is something uniquely American and could prove to be a potent model if applied abroad. Brokers do play a major role in those markets but they’re a jack of all trades, Goldin explained, offering every product there is, resulting in limited throughput for a single core product. Markets like the UK and Australia offer some unique advantages in that they’re English speaking and the products themselves are already established. Goldin said that there’s an opportunity for US operators that “know how to sell risk-based capital” to come in and leverage the Capify infrastructure and intellectual capital.

To be clear, he’s not talking about sitting in an office in New York or Miami and calling business owners in Sydney and London, but about actually opening up a local office in those markets.

“You got to have a local presence,” Goldin said. “A remote company doesn’t work. You need to actually be there.”

All this would be set up and developed with the guidance of Capify, a benefit that would shorten the learning curve of doing business in a new market. “There’s a lot of stuff to navigate,” he said. “Different regulations, different rules, different clients.”

deBanked first began exploring the Australian market in 2015. At the time, there were about 20 alternative lenders operating in the country. Since then the market has flourished. The population of Australia is only 26 million people, about two-thirds that of Canada, but Goldin said that it’s not as competitive.

“The US is bigger but also 50x the competition,” he said.

For anyone interested in this opportunity, the best way to contact him is through LinkedIn. The original post can be found here.