Now is the Time to Bring Everyone to the Table

Stephanie Eidelman

The challenges facing debt collectors – and creditors, and consumers – today are more than 30 years in the making. Conflicting laws, confusing disclosures, law suits over technicalities, and the proliferation of true “bad actors,” have all contributed to today’s environment of hyper focus on new rules and regulations.

This is a great opportunity. People on all sides of the issue are having their say – in many cases, publicly telling their side of the story. It has been quite a process to watch and to take part in. Never in my nearly 15 years covering the ARM industry have I seen such activity and such a high level of engagement from so many.

The process of responding to the CFPB’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking brought industry groups, including creditors, together to talk about common interests. Many companies and individuals stepped up to participate. It’s great to see proactive efforts aimed at productive contribution.

I think we can do even better. Wherever possible, we need to bring all of the stakeholders together to engage in a meaningful way that gets past what we know to be the extreme or obvious positions on each side. The devil is always in the details. It’s never as easy as it seems to “just” do this or “simply” do that. We need in-depth dialogue among creditors, collectors, consumer advocates, regulators, and technology providers so that as many people as possible truly understand each other – and together can develop solutions that work for both industry and consumer.

This dialogue can – and should – take many forms. Here are some examples:

• The FTC and CFPB opened the dialogue in June 2013 with a joint roundtable entitled “The Life of a Debt” that included both open and closed sessions among all of the groups.
• Last October, NARCA hosted a Symposium at George Washington University aimed solely at educating regulators, press, and the public about the role of collection attorneys.
• This January at insideARM’s Larger Market Participant Summit, a panel of five consumer advocates were invited to talk about their positions on communication with consumers (among other topics), with the goal of identifying common ground – not differences – that could be the basis for productive discussion and ultimate rulemaking. This session was followed by a more in-depth discussion among collectors and the consumer advocates to dive deeper into the issues.
• The Consumer Relations Consortium (CRC) was established in August 2013 with the mission of engaging with consumer advocates and building long term relationships that foster on-going dialogue and better understanding. In fact, one member of the CRC just last week hosted one of these consumer groups at his agency, providing a tour, a Q&A session with collectors, and an extended conversation with management about topics like disputes, debt validation, call frequency, customer treatment, compensation, CMS, and debt settlement companies.

We need as long a list of activities like this as we possibly can. The more interactions we have with consumer groups the less misunderstood debt collectors will be.

Stephanie Eidelman is the president & CEO of The iA Institute, whose mission is to bring perspective to the complex ARM industry through insight and collaboration. She will be moderating a dynamic panel discussion, “Collaborative Resolution to Long-Standing Collection Challenges,” as the opening general session at next week’s 18th Annual National Collections & Operational Risk Conference in Miami.