True Accord with Ohad Samet (CEO) | E110

Bringing technology, and empathy to debt collection.

Summary:

In this 110th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host welcomes Ohad Samet, Co-founder and CEO of True Accord, to talk about leading with empathy even in debt collection, how True Accord’s debt collection model has impacted both creditors and debtors, and more.

Episode Highlights:

  • 00:37: – True Accord is a machine learning-based digital debt collection platform used by creditors and financial institutions.

  • 01:57: – Others often see people in debt either as villains or as victims.

  • 05:00: – The majority of people have debt collection horror stories, but the people working as debt collectors aren’t bad people, but the way the industry is structured, they are incentivized to do things that create a bad experience.

  • 05:55: – True Accord’s machine learning helps track user behavior to determine the best way to reach each customer and when to have human interaction versus digital intervention.

  • 10:35: – At first, Ohad would get laughed out of offices and was being threatened by other creditors.

  • 11:50: – Ohad sees True Accord as the payment provider for creditors.

  • 13:15: – Traditional debt collection models pressure customers to pay as much as possible over the phone instead of committing to a payment plan that will actually work for them, so by working with the customer empathetically to find manageable payment plans that customers will actually stick to, True Accord sees higher rates of return.

  • 14:41: – Their first communication with customers is always an email.

  • 16:30: – True Accord fits to customer’s schedule both in terms of times that they can access the system to pay and what their individual cash flow is like.

  • 19:50: – The biggest surprise for Ohad has been that their clients have been surprised by how few complaints they receive about their debt collection.

  • 22:55: – True Accord could really only exist now because of how technologically enabled it is; the overhead would have been much too high several years ago.

  • 24:33: – If Ohad could change one thing, it would be the mindset of some of the major financial institutions to make them care about user experience.

  • 26:07: – The biggest challenge has been compliance.

  • 27:48: – Ohad is most excited about the company’s Slack channel sharing compliments from customers.

3 Key Points

  1. Providing a good user experience for debt collection benefits both brands and their customers.

  2. Existing debt collection incentive structures encourage call center operators to be dehumanizing and lack compassion.

  3. Machine learning technology is what has enabled intelligent communication with customers to happen on their terms.

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “You have to have an empathetic approach to a complex issue, and you can solve it, you can help people end up on the good side of things.” –Ohad Samet

  • “People come home after their second shift and they can engage with us and pay on their own terms, and that’s the important thing. Fitting to their payment periods, fitting to their unreliable cash flow, and that’s a lot of the negotiation.” –Ohad Samet

  • “We needed to be in the right intersection between understanding compliance, caring about the problem, and knowing how to use technology to solve it.” –Ohad Samet

Resources Mentioned:


Full Transcript:

Jason Pereira: Hello, welcome to FinTech Impact. I'm your host Jason Pereira. Before we get started, just a reminder to sign up for my newsletter at jasonpereira.ca for information on all podcasts, blog posts and TV appearances. Now on to today's show. Today's show, I have Ohad Samet, CEO of TrueAccord. TrueAccord is an online digital platform that seeks to take the pain and confrontation out of debt collection. And with that, here's my interview with Ohad. Hello, Ohad. 

Ohad Samet: Hello. 

Jason Pereira: Thanks for taking the time today. 

Ohad Samet: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Jason Pereira: Good. So, Ohad Samet of TrueAccord, tell us about TrueAccord. 

Ohad Samet: TrueAccord is a machine learning based digital and mobile first collection service that creditors, financial institutions, some of the most well known eCommerce brands and others use when people owe them money. It's a service that is an antithesis of every harassing, aggressive collection service out there. It is a brand positive experience that consumers actually appreciate and give good reviews to and it helps to recover more money with a good user experience that both creditors and debtors appreciate and like and come back and use whenever they have to. 

Jason Pereira: Good, and you know what? I'm glad you went there, because honestly when people think of debt collection, not the nicest of considerations pops up in people's minds. And one of the reasons why, initially when you emailed me, I was a little bit reluctant until I saw, okay, let's have a conversation about how you're doing this differently and that conversation led to you being on the podcast. We're going to talk about that experience and what that looks like to use your platform versus the traditional methods. Before we get there, let's talk about what it is that drove you guys to create a better solution for this space. 

Ohad Samet: Right. Well, you're absolutely right in what you said, but when people think about consumers in debt, everyone who's not in debt, they think of consumers in debt is one of few things. Victims or villains. They're villains, they're deadbeats. They don't want to pay. We should hit them on the head with a proverbial hammer, sue them or what have you or even harass them. If they're victims, we have to leave them alone and never ask them for the money back. But in reality, we have tens of millions of people a year who are touched by debt collection in the U.S. Credit is a big issue. Life happens to people and the vast majority of people who don't pay is because something happened to them. A loved one got sick, they lost her job, they got divorced. A bunch of stuff like that, and I like operating in the grayscale. 

Ohad Samet: I like operating in the areas, not from a legal perspective, but from a human- 

Jason Pereira: [crosstalk 00:02:36] debt collection. 

Ohad Samet: Exactly, we're very compliant and very on the good side of regulation, but in the gray scale of human interaction, where you have to have an empathetic approach to a complex issue and you can solve it and you can help people end up on the good side of things. And that is something that drives all of us. The positive reviews we get, people who say, "I can't believe I'm recommending a collection service," After having gone through the debt collection process. That's what keeps us going and we want to replace the old way of doing things in this industry. Now, my last role was Chief Risk Officer for a lending company and I saw how important debt collection is and was, to me in my role. But at the same time nobody wanted to invest in improving the debt collection process because the common wisdom was we hire a lot of people, you make a lot of phone calls and you hope for the best. 

Ohad Samet: The markets seem to be moving away. If any of your listeners answers a bunch of phone calls every day and is happy to talk to people, they don't know and then just call them. I'd be very surprised. We use digital communication. That's what we care about. People don't respond to phone calls, people don't respond to letters and they don't respond to legalese. So, this industry was basically dead and not knowing it, because everything was moving away from their old way of doing business. And finally, it really felt like we could build a brand in debt collection. I keep going back to that, the good experience. People who are in a tough spot getting an experience that they appreciate, that they feel humanizes them, and then have an emotional connection to us, which we thought would be able to leverage long term into giving people additional solutions to manage their financial lives in general. And this is something that we did in 2019 and we'll do a lot more of in 2020. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. It's interesting. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a young man who was basically applying to work in my company and he worked in debt collections before and he basically was their number one collector, by a long shot, and even got promoted, implemented programs. And you know what the secret was? Treating people like human beings with respect and trying to find something that works for everyone. It was quite astonishing that that simple realization was lost upon people. So, let's talk about how it is that you have solved these problems, how you've moved this industry into the current millennium, and basically how you're trying to make it a less painful process for everyone involved? 

Ohad Samet: Well, let's start from understanding what the baseline is. 

Jason Pereira: Sure. 

Ohad Samet: What does that question looks like? Everybody has some horrible stories about what that collectors are and abuse in some. The majority of people in the debt collection industry are not bad people. They come to work every day like you and me. They want to do a good job. Many of them want to treat people with respect and some, but the way their incentives are structured and the way the industry is structured, under the best circumstances, you're giving people a bad experience. Because you come to work, as a collector, you have a low base high commission. You've got to make your collection numbers, otherwise you can't feed your family. You get a list of phone numbers and you have an automated dialer that blasts them with call attempts and you get people on the phone. 

Ohad Samet: It's a cold call and your job is to keep them on the phone and get them to pay as much as possible again or you don't make your commission. Under the best circumstances, that is not a good experience. There's no way to create a good experience. Now for us, we said, "what if we flipped the model? What if we create a system that, based on historical data, decides who to contact, when, through what channel, with what voice, what payment offer to put in front of them and tracks their interaction with our system." We don't track people all over the web or anything like that, to decide how to follow up, what should the next step be, and offer a great user experience. Allow people to do everything from their mobile devices. More than 80% of our traffic is from mobile devices and tablets and try to turn everything into human-machine interaction. A self-serve, highly personalized, highly convenient user experience. 

Ohad Samet: And then only have people involved when the system doesn't know what to do or when people actually want to talk to a person, if they call in or the email in, which does happen. So us, compared to traditional agency, is like a completely automated marketing and sales campaign compared to a telemarketing campaign. It's completely different. The user experience is different, the feel is different. The channels of choice are different. And when people call in, If they do, they are treated by a customer service team that doesn't have commission and is not measured by how much money they collect. So, everything is geared towards- 

Jason Pereira: [crosstalk 00:07:05] scalping and basically, you're actually there and incentivized around service as opposed to collections. 

Ohad Samet: Exactly, and the reason we collect more is not because we squeeze people for more money. It's because we get a lot more people on payment arrangements that work for them and they just stick to them. And so on average, every consumer who pays us, pays us less than they would a traditional agency every month. But that adds up over time because we let them customize their payment arrangement to their day. And if they can't make a payment, they can move it. If they need to customize their payment arrangement, they can do it from their phone. Everything is geared towards convenience and flexibility as much as possible. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, you're starting from a very novel premise that people don't want to be deadbeats, right? They don't want to be seen as someone who's not going to live up to their word. They want to basically do what's right, but they got into a difficult situation. You give them a self serve platform that allows them to try to do the right thing. You support them in the time that they need support. And yeah, I would say it's definitely turning the model on its head. 

Ohad Samet: Exactly. And more, my manager of content and marketing strategies likes to say, we lead with empathy. For us it's not the absence of malicious intent. We don't talk to someone and say, "Hey, you're not a deadbeat." We don't even go there. We say, "Hey, you're a good person who fell on hard times. How can we figure it out?" And people... This message obviously resonates with people. They don't want to be judged. They don't want fingers pointed at them. We all understand that. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. Well, you've gone from an accusatory turn to one of compassion, right? 

Ohad Samet: Right. 

Jason Pereira: And, it's more often than not, even when we get negative feedback or get negative responses in my business from clients for whatever reason, I have the same thing. I lead with empathy and it may never stop to think that the reason they're being that way to you is because you've done something wrong. It could be any other thing in their daily life, especially in something, I feel like, this, right? Like, "Oh, thank you for reminding me that I'm going through this very difficult time of job loss, insecurity, health issues, whatever it may be." And basically just calling them up and saying, "Well, that's too bloody bad. You've got to pay, otherwise we're going to do X, Y, Z to you." It's just not the way. 

Ohad Samet: Yeah. And we do have customers who call in and they're angry and they're complaining and I tell my team, "I want them to complain, but I want them to complain like they complain about Amazon." 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. 

Ohad Samet: I want them to feel like- 

Jason Pereira: [crosstalk 00:09:29] collecting from them, not the guys who are enabling them to live up to their end of the bargain. 

Ohad Samet: Yeah. But more than that, I want them to complain like they complain from a place of entitlement. I am entitled to good service. I am entitled to be treated like a human being. And I'm pissed because you guys are... I don't know what, I sent you an email and you didn't respond in three hours which is what I expect, versus please don't sue me or please don't be aggressive with me. You see what I'm saying? I want people to be in that place psychologically because that's how we want them to engage with us. I want us to be a brand that they interact with, and they think of as a partner. And part of being a partner is they expect stuff from us. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. I'm curious, the first customers you went to, specifically the people with the debt. When you pitched this idea, did they think you were just on a different planet, that you just didn't get it? Because this is a very big departure from the norm. One that in a human sense makes a lot of sense. But in general, just the way these people who've be responsible for these types of environments before, they wouldn't see the world that way, right? So, what was the reaction you were getting? 

Ohad Samet: So, you're talking about the first creditors? 

Jason Pereira: The first creditors you went and spoke to, yes. The first ones you pitched and said, "this is what we want to do for you." 

Ohad Samet: Oh yeah. For a while, we laughed out of the office. I would get phone calls from collectors yelling at me that what I do is illegal and I'm going to go to jail. Absolutely incorrect. 

Jason Pereira: What you're doing is illegal. That's hilarious. 

Ohad Samet: Absolutely. And absolutely no legs, but people say what they say. So, it was a funny experience, at least in hindsight. But yeah, we found a lot of traction and I can't talk about our clients publicly, but we work with some of the major banks, the biggest financial institutions, very well known eCommerce brands and fintech brands and so on. And so, people have come around to our way of thinking years ago, which is why we've been able to get to the size that we are today. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, and that makes sense. You would work with some large ones first, right? Because these are companies that have that problem and you know say, "Hey, let's give them 1% of our debt burden and see if they can do anything with it and see how the baseline is." Now, you've got this very intriguing chart on your website that I can't find any studies on, but tell me about your control group versus your actual performance and how you guys perform via the alternative. 

Ohad Samet: Yeah. Our business is like a payment provider. I used to work at Klarna, and Klarna is a competing offer, pay after delivery. I was their Chief Risk Officer, right? And when a merchant adds Klarna as a payment option, Klarna is competing for share of wallet, right? There's Klarna, there's PayPal, there's a credit card, there's this and that. And Klarna is basically saying, "Hey, we will convert better for you, we will increase the basket size for consumers and we will approve more of your credit cards than PayPal and we will help you grow your business." And the merchants are saying, "well, I'll give you a shot, I'll give you this percent of the traffic. And if you do well, I'm going to give you more share of your wallet." We're exactly the same. Meaning, we compete head to head with traditional collection agencies. When we work with a major bank, the bank will give us this percent, then that percent. There's more than one competitor. And as we collect more, they're like, "Oh, we will give you more debt on a monthly basis to work on and service." And this is the graphic you're seeing. This is what's called the liquidation rate. The percent of dollars collected out of dollars that are given to us. And since we do better than those traditional collection agencies, we get more and more business. 

Jason Pereira: But it looks to be a bit of a hockey stick here where the liquidation rate increases the longer the placements happen. Do you want to speak to why there seems to be a slow run up and then a positive pop, what's going on there? 

Ohad Samet: Yeah, that's a really great catch. So, going back to my point about payment arrangements, when a traditional collector's on the phone with a consumer, they want them to pay as much as possible on the phone. So, if the consumer is committing to a payment plan that they can't really stick to like, "I'll pay in three payments," they pay one payment and then they fall off the wagon because they felt pressured and they can really can't truly afford a second and third payment. With us, they're not pressured. Maybe they sign up for a six month payment or a 12 month payment. So, they pay us less on a monthly basis. But the thing is that because we're flexible, because we work with people this way, we sign up twice as many, three times as many people. [inaudible 00:13:50] stick to a payment plan or the payment arrangements a lot more, up to twice as much, compared to what an aggressive collector would get from them on the phone. So, what you're seeing is this compound effect month by month as people continue paying us but they fall off with the traditional solution. We just collect more, on the second- 

Jason Pereira: The way you've done it is smart, right? They're having input without pressure on what it is they feel they can be able to commit to. I'm sure that if they have lump sums that show up that were unexpected or they end up with more cash at the end of the month than they can, you give them the option to go ahead and pay that off as well. You're creating a routine and a habit as opposed to, there's a gun to my head almost over the phone and I feel very uncomfortable and I just need to agree to this guy so he can leave me alone. 

Ohad Samet: Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: So, tell me about the app itself from the customer standpoint and tell me about what their options look like when they're being given choice. 

Ohad Samet: So, first, communication is almost always in email. We like email, we say it's the big river that everything flows into. Email is very popular. Although people use Slack and other in the tech scene, talking them down. It's very popular across all age groups. People love email, they use emails very actively. Also, has very good real estate in terms of putting all the disclosures and other stuff we need for regulatory reasons, compliance reasons. And from that point on, the system starts tracking their behavior and decides how to move across different channels and send additional follow on notifications in traditional other channels to get people to respond to our communication. Once someone clicks the link and gets to our website, they see the options that are available to them. That's also one of the things that's determined by a suite of machine learning algorithms, using data from historical interactions with millions of consumers. So, we may offer them an opportunity to pay in full. 

Ohad Samet: Some people do that, settle for less than 100 percent. Set up a payment plan and the different options for length of payment plan are also determined by an algorithm and their previous behavior, and down to good faith payment, a partial payment and so on. It does not sound like a lot, but within that world of what we can offer them, this is a lot of flexibility because a lot of people who are not in the crisis right now, that are not just fighting for every dollar, that are ready to engage. It's mostly about fitting their cash flow to the requirements and many times people work multiple jobs. They have money at nights and they want to engage in those times and more than 25% of our engagements are in hours where a call center would not be legally allowed to operate because that's illegal under federal rules. So, people come home after, say their second shift, and they can just engage with us and pay on their own terms and that's the important thing. Fitting to their payment periods, fitting to their unreliable cash flow, and that's a lot of the negotiation. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. And you're giving him feedback, right? You're showing them where they currently stand. 

Ohad Samet: Yes. 

Jason Pereira: What their progress is. In a lot of ways that gamifies the entire thing for them, to be able to get that positive feedback and I was here, I'm now here. This actually is starting to seem doable. It's far more positive, so all right, excellent. In terms of consumer feedback, the success numbers are clearly the biggest indicator that you're doing something right. Tell me what the response has been in terms of the consumers you're dealing with. What's the feedback then on your general experience and what it's been like to deal with you? 

Ohad Samet: Well, that's the cool thing, I don't need to tell you. You can see for yourself, meaning... It's true. You can Google us, look at our Google reviews. We have 4.8 stars on Google. 

Jason Pereira: A collection agency has 4.8 stars. Wow, okay. 

Ohad Samet: A massive NPS. We have four stars out of five on the Better Business Bureau. People actually go to the Better Business Bureau website to recommend us and you read them and people saying, "I can't believe I'm recommending a collection agency." You can see some examples on the website as well, but those are coming from actual reviews that you can see from real people and that is just incredibly gratifying and from our perspective, is it's almost easy for us to surprise people because what we expect is so negative. 

Jason Pereira: Bar's pretty low, let's be honest. 

Ohad Samet: Exactly. The bar is low, but to have a 60 net promoter score in debt collection, it sounds almost unimaginable. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. For those who don't understand that promoter score and how it works. Basically, it's a score as to what'd you recommend this service to someone else, and a score of one to 10 and basically anything, I believe it's eight, nine or 10, counts as a plus one. Anything seven and six counts as nothing. Anything below that counts as a negative one. So, basically what's happening is that when you do the math, 60% of the output, meaning that the majority of people who recommend you, not 60% people are an eight, nine or 10. But 60% is the end result of the people who said, "I like these guys," minus the people who didn't. That's a big number. So your number, based on that, number of people recommend you could be in the 80s and it could be in the seventies, eighties, and nineties for all we know. Depending on how many people dislike you, right? So, that is crazy. This is one of the things that struck me the most when we had our initial conversation. It's like, "wait a sec, what? You're a debt collection agency and people are giving you NPS scores that are hard to reach for traditional companies?" That's pretty impressive. 

Ohad Samet: If we had to guess, a regular collection agency could have a negative NPS because it has a lot more detractors then people would recommend it. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, no, I have to think, for a lot of the companies you're dealing with, besides the fact that you're collecting money on their behalf and they're seeing a higher compliance rate because of that. Frankly, the way you're handling people has to have some brand equity for them, right? They're not hiring guys to basically run to come to their doors, for lack of a better term, the worst case scenario. They're hiring people who basically, are respecting the client in order to help them get to their end goal. What's the feedback from the companies you're dealing with in terms of how you help their brand equity? 

Ohad Samet: People sometimes ask me, "what are the biggest surprises you've had?" And that has been my biggest surprise and I don't think... It's not malicious. It's not like people don't care about consumers in debt, but from an incentive perspective, it's not like major banks or financial institutions calculate NPS and recoveries. We do. They don't. So, nobody's walking around and saying, "Hey, what's our NPS? Do people like the experience," and so on. We're changing that. We're absolutely changing that, but it hasn't been part of the overall narrative, unfortunately. I think it's going to become... We're committed to that and over time that's going to happen. And what I can tell you is, they come to us and they say, "well, you have a fraction of the complaints and other issues that other collectors have. What do you do? A company your size needs 20 lawyers. How many do you have?" "Well, we have one-ish." "How do you do that?" "Well, that's how we do it." And we're looking for the inroads to have that discussion. Of course, fintechs care about that a lot. eCommerce companies care about that a lot. And that, we get a lot of positive feedback around that, but the major financial institutions, it's still a process. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, that's interesting. They're not hard wired to think that. And if anything, they're looking at the end result, which is higher collections, lower complaints, but not tying it back to the fact that, "Oh, you guys have enhanced our client experience." Right? I think that speaks a lot to their entire concept of client experience in the first place, but it's interesting. So, if you're not paying commission to the people who work for you, so how are you charging for this? How are you making money off of all this service? 

Ohad Samet: As a company, we are paid predominantly on commission, meaning a percentage of the dollars that we're collecting. However, it's not tied to any individual's performance. So, no individual can actually do anything that will encourage abuse. Meaning, nobody is incentivized to pressure people more in order to collect more. No single person can submit a cogent change or a behavioral logic change that will pressure people more. Not to mention that we hire people for caring about the mission and caring about user experience, so they're just not going to do it. So, even though we're paid for success, nobody in the team is incentivized to do that on their own. So, it's more about improving the user experience. The positive thing for us that we've discovered over the years is that, by far, if we improve user experience, we do a better job, we collect better. It is not about harassing people more effectively, which is where a cynic would go. 

Jason Pereira: Absolutely. And that's exactly... Why would you want to work with the person that makes your life difficult? It's an interesting challenge that I was thinking about as you were talking about your model. You have a variable performance based compensation at the top line of the company and the way that that risk is disaggregated in traditional companies is to push that type of risk down to the actual employees, right? 

Ohad Samet: That's right. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. You, on the other hand, your employees become a fixed cost because essentially they're, lack of a better term, a fixed cost because essentially they're all salaries. And I think, traditionally back in the day before technology existed, this model may not have worked because with the high fixed cost and variable topline, you would've had that line cross. But because you're enabling this through technology, lowering your overhead costs, their own staffing, you're able to potentially create a wider margin. I'm guessing you employ far fewer people than the average collection agency. 

Ohad Samet: Absolutely. A fraction of the number of people of the call center employees. Of course we turn around and we pay a bunch of talented and expensive engineers and data scientists and product managers and a bunch of others because we want to continue to improve our system. But yeah, from a unit economics perspective, we look completely different than a traditional agency. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. And you can ratchet up and ratchet down that spend on development as variability hits. But yeah, so how long have you been at this now? 

Ohad Samet: So, we raised our first round at the end of 2013 and we launched to the public in June of 2014. So, six years, working full time. 

Jason Pereira: Six years. And frankly the chart makes it look like you're orders of magnitude more successful than the alternative, so what a novel idea that treating people like people is going to be a profitable endeavor. 

Ohad Samet: And using technology to do it. So, we needed to be in the right intersection between understanding compliance, caring about the problem and knowing how to use technology to solve it. 

Jason Pereira: But that makes sense. The reality is the average consumer spends about 70% of the time online before they make a purchase, right? And so, that decisions being made online, you just basically took something that never existed in the online realm and moved into the online realm and gave them that same degree of freedom. So, before we wrap up, there's three questions I ask everyone on the podcast. The first question is, if you had one wish for something you can change in your industry or in your company, what would it be? 

Ohad Samet: If there's one thing I could change is, I would change the mindset of some of the major financial institutions and if I could wave a wand and make everyone in collections and recoveries care about user experience and the same set of values that we care about in using technology, I would do that. We have been leading the charge almost on our own for six years now. And finally we're seeing a new rule that came from the federal government that we helped... We didn't write it, but we provided data for [inaudible 00:25:14]. So, we're hopeful that that's going to change behavior because when the rules change, everybody changes their behavior. I would love for all of us to just talk about user experience and technology and PS and how to service consumers better. And that's not the case right now. And again, not because people are bad people, it's because incentives are misaligned and I would love for them to be aligned around that. 

Jason Pereira: I'm going to misquote it, but I believe it was Charlie Monger who said, "if you work on incentives, work on nothing else." And it's so true because so many of the negative outcomes in this world are driven by incentives being misaligned with outcomes. Yeah, so I agree with you. I think it takes a, I won't call it a generational shift, but at least a management cycle shift to come to understand that the way things were wasn't necessarily the right way. And yeah, it may have worked but it can work better, especially if you treat people with respect. For those of you listening, if you hear any childlike noises, my daughter has joined us. She refuses to sit outside, so she might chime up at some point. So, the second question I ask is, what's been the biggest challenge in getting to where you are today with this company? 

Ohad Samet: Biggest challenge is, and we knew it coming in, compliance. Not being compliant, but just in some cases that compliance theater. It's not the laws, it's how people choose to interpret them in different ways in different organizations. And especially in the debt collection industry where a lot is impacted by case law and not just rules, but also there are laws on the state level basis, sometimes on the city level basis. That complexity, now that we've surmounted it, it's a competitive advantage and it's going to make it harder for people to compete with us and build our technology that we have, but it's been really challenging. It's not the type of company that can 10x in one year. Meaning, even if I had business to 10x in one year, I would not because I just couldn't service everything in a compliant way and just onboard all of those banks. So, I can double, I can triple, but probably not more than that, and that's what we're sticking to. And even that is very challenging for a team of really seasoned operators that we've built. 

Jason Pereira: It makes sense. Regulation at the scale of not just, as you said, state level, but getting down to some city levels. Every one of those is a use case. And the good news is as you make up for the lack of ability to take on more clients faster by the hockey stick that you have at the end of your collection cycle. So, that works out. 

Ohad Samet: Yeah, and negative churn. Meaning, we're growing really fast with existing clients because everything is working very well for them. 

Jason Pereira: No, I think based on your metrics, if you didn't have a net negative churn, I'd be very surprised. So, the last question I have is, what excites you the most about what you're working on and gets you up in the morning to keep doing what it is you're doing? 

Ohad Samet: Oh, so many things. But if I had to distill it into one thing, it would be, we have a channel on Slack called True Compliments and every day people who are... Do you work the floor? Do you look at the data? They post comments from people who've gone through our process and just express thanks for our service, for what we do for them, for how we impacted their lives. We even have a little bit of that, on our website, a little bit more deeper stories and it's just touching and it feels like everything that we do, every aggressive phone call that we replace with an email or with a text message or with an online interaction impacts people in a positive way and at the end of the day, that is the biggest reward for me. Of course, business growth and all this stuff, it's great, but feeling like we're actually making a difference every day. That's incredible. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, I can definitely understand that in the world you're in. This podcast is hopefully a valuable lesson to people that, even in what appears to be the most adversarial of situations, there's always room to find humanity and to get a better outcome for everybody. So, good work. Keep doing what you're doing. It's, clearly... I never thought, again, you said the realization that I'm complimenting a debt collection service for doing what they're doing, but you're doing it because of humanity. So, that's fantastic. Keep it up and I wish you nothing but the best of luck. 

Ohad Samet: Absolutely. Thank you very much for your time. This has been fun and I'm sure we'll talk more in the future. 

Jason Pereira: Absolutely. And I hope you found that even the most traditionally adversarial of relationships, there's definitely room for improvement, especially when we respect each other, maybe even do so digitally. And with that, as always, I'm your host, Jason Pereira. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, place a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care. 

Speaker 3: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google play, or find more episodes at fintechimpact.co. 


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