There's a mad dash to automate the world's most hated calls. You'll hear from an AI debt collector sometime soon. She introduced herself as Eve, but Ben knew right away that the voice on the other end of the line was a bot. She also knew how much money he'd owed a former landlord ($266). She didn't seem to know that he'd settled with a collection agency five months prior. Eve said she was an AI agent from ProCollect and was calling to collect a debt.

Designing effective debt collection systems is crucial for improving operational efficiency and reducing costs in the financial industry. However, the challenges of maintaining script diversity, contextual relevance, and coherence make this task particularly difficult. This paper presents a debt collection system based on real debtor-collector data from a major commercial bank. We construct a script library from real-world debt collection conversations, and propose a two-stage retrieval based response system for contextual relevance. Experimental results show that our system improves script diversity, enhances response relevance, and achieves practical deployment efficiency through knowledge distillation. This work offers a scalable and automated solution, providing valuable insights for advancing debt collection practices in real-world applications.

Debt collection negotiations (DCN) are vital for managing non-performing loans (NPLs) and reducing creditor losses. Traditional methods are labor-intensive, while large language models (LLMs) offer promising automation potential. However, prior systems lacked dynamic negotiation and real-time decision-making capabilities. This paper explores LLMs in automating DCN and proposes a novel evaluation framework with 13 metrics across 4 aspects. Our experiments reveal that LLMs tend to over-concede compared to human negotiators. To address this, we propose the Multi-Agent Debt Negotiation (MADeN) framework, incorporating planning and judging modules to improve decision rationality. We also apply post-training techniques, including DPO with rejection sampling, to optimize performance. Our studies provide valuable insights for practitioners and researchers seeking to enhance efficiency and outcomes in this domain.

Automated next-best action recommendation for each customer in a sequential, dynamic and interactive context has been widely needed in natural, social and business decision-making. Personalized next-best action recommendation must involve past, current and future customer demographics and circumstances (states) and behaviors, long-range sequential interactions between customers and decision-makers, multi-sequence interactions between states, behaviors and actions, and their reactions to their counterpart's actions. No existing modeling theories and tools, including Markovian decision processes, user and behavior modeling, deep sequential modeling, and personalized sequential recommendation, can quantify such complex decision-making on a personal level. We take a data-driven approach to learn the next-best actions for personalized decision-making by a reinforced coupled recurrent neural network (CRN). CRN represents multiple coupled dynamic sequences of a customer's historical and current states, responses to decision-makers' actions, decision rewards to actions, and learns long-term multi-sequence interactions between parties (customer and decision-maker). Next-best actions are then recommended on each customer at a time point to change their state for an optimal decision-making objective. Our study demonstrates the potential of personalized deep learning of multi-sequence interactions and automated dynamic intervention for personalized decision-making in complex systems.

You can test this hypothesis in a most unlikely place to roll out a new technology: the Indian countryside. The setting is perhaps not as odd as it seems, with about 5% to 10% of the country's farmers not repaying their tractor loans on time. The explanations for tardiness range from failed crops to medical emergencies and strategic defaults in anticipation of state-mandated debt waivers, a regular feature of the political economy. But delinquency often stems from more mundane reasons: Borrowers forget their due dates, or fail to withdraw cash to pay the nonbank financiers who provide the bulk of loans for farm equipment purchases. Like in most emerging markets, these last-mile hurdles pose a frustratingly complex challenge to India's creditors.

In the good old days of banking, your chances of getting a loan often depended on how well you knew the bank manager and your reputation as a trustworthy customer. Banks were reluctant to lend to those who posed a credit risk or lacked credit history, and thus being unable to repay loans. Banks, as far as possible, tried to minimise loan defaults and get into an arduous debt recovery process. Since the turn of the century, however, the banking and financial industry has evolved and innovated in ways not seen before. The emergence of fintechs -- especially digital lenders and financing startups -- has made the disbursal of all kinds of loans so easy that you can now obtain a personal or an unsecured loan at the click of a mouse.

During the 13 years he spent in banking, Tomasz Borowski's career spanned operations, risk management, and product management, where he also witnessed the brutality and unprofessional methods that conventional debt collection agencies adopted to retrieve outstanding balances. He observed the same thing when he moved to Ukraine in 2005 to continue his banking career. He did his own research on alternative methods and came to know about two digital debt collection companies--US-based TrueAccord and Polish debt collection agency Kruk SA--both worth over a billion US dollars today. "I decided to move to Southeast Asia and began exploring the market here. It was obvious to me that the situation here was similar to Ukraine. I decided to utilize my experience in finance and create a professional credit management services company to help change this market," Borowski told KrASIA.

Traditionally, chasing customer to collect a payment was a laborious task; endless dialling, letters and emails with the increasing number of attempts to try and get customers to simply talk to you was challenging enough, let alone getting them to pay. The rise of messaging and messaging apps has seen a significant shift in how consumers want to interact not only with their friends, but more importantly with companies. And this has been crucial shift for customer debt collections. The need to continuously chase and endless calling to try and connect with customers about making a payment has gotten a lot easier. We are now living in a digital world and adopting a digital approach to debt collection and engaging with customers via digital conversations is becoming more and more mainstream.

AI can be utilised in many different ways when pursuing debt collection. Firstly, software engineered by LATERAL can harness predictive data and analytics to pre-empt debt delinquency by generating actions based on a customer's previous behaviour. Businesses can rely on AI to monitor, provide alerts and even automate responses when there are changes to any key data elements that constitute a customer's risk profile. Using statistical analysis of the historical data of those owing debt, AI can predict the most effective way to ensure a future response from those customers and contact them accordingly – may it be by SMS, WhatsApp, email or Chat. Actions are simplified, automated and personalised.

AI can be utilised in many different ways when pursuing debt collection. Firstly, software engineered by LATERAL can harness predictive data and analytics to pre-empt debt delinquency by generating actions based on a customer's previous behaviour. Businesses can rely on AI to monitor, provide alerts and even automate responses when there are changes to any key data elements that constitute a customer's risk profile. Using statistical analysis of the historical data of those owing debt, AI can predict the most effective way to ensure a future response from those customers and contact them accordingly – may it be by SMS, WhatsApp, email or Chat. Actions are simplified, automated and personalised.