May 9, 2013 — Holganix Named ‘CleanTech Company of the Year’ at 2013 Enterprise Awards
http://pact.gpcc.com/Winners.aspx
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Tens of thousands of retail workers can now turn field reporting into automatic immediate actions for high-quality improvement. STERLING, VA, April 8, 2013 — Natural Insight®, a private retail technology company engaged in workforce management, today announced the release of NI WorkFlow, a significant set of new cloud-based capabilities. With this latest improvement to the Natural Insight platform, in-store reports from retail workers now generate immediate automated actions to improve retail execution and promotional results. With users completing hundreds of thousands of retail assignments monthly, improving compliance at the store level reduces issue response time that has an immediate impact on sales. According to many retail studies and data compiled by Natural Insight, as much as much as 30% if promotional results are being lost due to poor in-store execution. Timely response to dynamic in-store conditions has always been a challenge for retailers, and reacting to data from thousands of locations has simply taken too long. “This has been a challenge for as long as I’ve worked in the retail industry” stated Stefan Midford, CEO of Natural Insight. “By integrating field reporting with preconfigured, automated actions, NI Workflow enables out-of-stock alerts for action in minutes, not days. In addition, we have completely automated the methods to immediately schedule corrective action, driven by the data from an in-store worker.” Bart Flaherty, CEO of analytics company Optimization Partners, stated “This is another significant step in the ongoing evolution of retail, and the changes which are necessary for retailers to catch up with modern shopping habits. Consumers have a choice to shop online or in town. When it comes to purchases, they want to quickly receive their products. Retailers and manufacturers who can immediately resolve issues on the sales floor will be the winners. NI WorkFlow simplifies and speeds their ability to respond by linking data to execution, using a turn-key technology platform.” In addition to its fully-managed and hosted solution, Natural Insight reduces the burden on IT by providing staging, configuration, and on-going monitoring of iPads for use on the sales floor. Delivering on its promise of out-of-the-box task management, Natural Insight can setup the iPads and ship them to the field fully equipped with secured mounts, instructions, and everything needed to get up-and-running in minutes. About Natural Insight About Optimization Partners iPad is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc. # # # |
| Media Contacts:Stefan Midford, President & CEO Natural Insight smidford@naturalinsight.com 800-961-5203 |
Funding Fuels Sustained Growth and Resource Expansion as Demand for Search-Based Applications Increases Across the Enterprise
New York, NY– April 3, 2013 - BA Insight today announced that it has secured its latest round of funding, raising $4.5 million, bringing the total amount raised to date to $15.7 million. All four of the company’s current venture capital investors participated in the round including Milestone Venture Partners, Osage Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group and Originate Ventures. The funding supports the company’s growth as the market continues to drive demand for solutions that unlock data across the enterprise.
BA Insight’s advanced search technology redefines how people access siloed information and collaborate. Organizations are increasingly dealing with rapidly growing volumes of structured and unstructured data, the inability to integrate information from legacy systems, and the move of many organizational systems to the cloud. As a result they often lack insight into critical business information. BA Insight enables enterprises to bring this information together for users, giving them actionable insights into customers, products, projects, expertise and more.
“Enterprise search is broken,” said Philip Eliot, Principal at Paladin Capital Group, “and BA Insight is unique in its ability to deliver useful information to the enterprise regardless of where, when and how they need it. Their solutions revolutionize information access.”
“Our continued investment in BA Insight reflects our confidence in the ability of BA Insight’s platform to transform search into a powerful weapon for the enterprise,” said Todd Pietri, co-founder and General Partner of Milestone Venture Partners. “BA Insight delivers tools that enable organizations to leverage their investments in existing solutions and expose data in an actionable, relevant way.”
BA Insight customers include industry-leading companies across a variety of industries including the legal, oil and gas, and pharmaceutical/life sciences. For more information on products and services, visit www.bainsight.com.
About BA Insight
BA Insight™ is the leading provider of integrated search technologies that help organizations leverage the full power of Microsoft SharePoint® across the enterprise. BA Insight’s flagship Longitude Search and Longitude Connector products let organizations extend Microsoft’s enterprise search capabilities across dozens of CRM, ERP, ECM, messaging, and collaboration systems, and delivers rich document preview and assembly tools that empower knowledge workers to act upon search results with greater speed and effectiveness.
About Milestone Venture Partners
Milestone Venture Partners is a venture capital fund located in New York City with $100 million under management. Milestone specializes in early-stage software and data services investments in Greater New York. Areas of expertise include enterprise information technology, Digital Health, media, marketing services and FinTech. For more information, visit www.milestonevp.com.
About Originate Ventures
Originate Ventures is a venture capital investment firm, targeting early stage product and services companies located in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic region. The firm focuses on opportunities with medical devices, healthcare, consumer, information technology, Web-based and commercial products. Operating with an entrepreneurial spirit and vision, Originate’s investments range in size from $500,000 to $4,000,000. For more information, visit www.originateventures.com.
About Osage Venture Partners
Osage Venture Partners (OVP) is a venture capital firm located just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that invests in early-stage enterprise technology companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. OVP raised its first fund in 2005, and has invested almost exclusively in enterprise software companies since that time. With over $100M under management, OVP seeks to invest in determined and creative entrepreneurs and provide them with the assistance required to build high growth businesses. For more information, visit www.osagepartners.com.
About Paladin Capital Group
Paladin Capital Group is a leading multi-stage private equity firm providing capital and strategic guidance to growing companies in the IT, telecommunications and alternative energy sectors. The firm focuses on companies with products and services that are “dual use” in nature, serving both commercial and government customers. Paladin has over $950 million dollars of committed capital across multiple funds and has invested in over 50 portfolio companies. For more information, visit www.paladincapgroup.com.
For information, contact:
Laura Sankowich
VP of Marketing at BA Insight
lsankowich@bainsight.com
646-786-8562
Rachel Holmes
Corporate Communications Manager at BA Insight
rholmes@bainsight.com
646-786-8556
Polycom Announces Winners of Its First App Developer Contest, Awards X2O Media Top Award for Creating a Live and On-Demand Video Content Delivery App With Polycom® RealPresence® APIs
Proton Media named finalist with a collaboration tool unifying the virtual and real worlds
VQ Communications named runner up for a scheduling and call management application
Please click on the link below for full story.
http://www.polycom.com/content/www/en/company/news/press-releases/2013/20130206_2.html
Proceeds to Fund Enhancement and CE Mark Approval of the Permaseal(TM) Transapical Access and Closure Technology
Bethlehem, PA – January 14, 2013 – Micro Interventional Devices, Inc.™ (MID), an emerging cardiovascular medical device company, announced today it has secured $3.5 million of its expected $5 million Series B financing. The initial tranche was led by Originate Ventures with existing investor, Battelle Ventures, LP, also participating in the round. In conjunction with the financing Mike Gausling, Managing Partner of Originate Ventures, will join the MID Board of Directors.
The funding will be used to support the ongoing development of the Permaseal™ product, advance the STASIS clinical study (Sutureless Transapical Access and Closure Study) and obtain CE Mark approval for Permaseal. The funding will also support MIDʼs research and development initiatives focused on developing its percutaneous transapical and large bore femoral access and closure devices.
“The market for transcatheter aortic valve implantation is expected to grow rapidly over the next several years as innovation continues to improve and simplify the procedure,” said Mike Gausling, Managing Partner of Originate Ventures. “Originate Ventures believes that Permaseal represents a significant opportunity given these market dynamics. I am excited to be joining MIDʼs Board of Directors and to work with management to ensure the successful clinical and commercial development of this revolutionary access and closure technology.”
Permaseal is the first transapical access device to enable true “self-sealing,” sutureless cardiac access and closure. The device is designed to enable a range of structural heart repair procedures including transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) and mitral valve replacement and repair.
“Closing the first tranche in our Series B, and the addition of Mike Gausling to MIDʼs Board, are key milestones in the growth of MID and ongoing development of Permaseal,” stated Michael Whitman, President and CEO of MID. “As TAVI becomes more widespread there is a critical need for efficient cardiac access and closure devices. We believe the Permaseal platform is a true game-changing technology, and we look forward to completing the STASIS trial and securing CE Mark in order to fulfill this unmet therapeutic need.”
About Micro Interventional Devices, Inc:
Micro Interventional Devices, Inc. (MID) is an emerging cardiovascular medical device company founded in May 2010. MID is developing solutions for transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), transcatheter mitral valve replacement and repair and other emerging structural heart repair procedures. The company is developing proprietary technology based on a breakthrough in soft-tissue anchoring and associated delivery devices that enable off-pump procedures. To learn more, please visit www.microinterventional.com.
Company Contact:
Micro Interventional Devices, Inc.
Katherine Whitman
Marketing Communications Manager
kwhitman@microinterventional.com
Media Contact:
Tiberend Strategic Advisors, Inc.
(212) 827-0020
Claire Sojda
csojda@tiberend.com
Quick Serve Restaurant with locations in Walmart, deploys system
NEW YORK, NY, January 14, 2013 — Natural Insight®, a private retail technology company engaged in workforce management, announced today at the National Retail Federation’s 102nd Annual Convention and Expo that in conjunction with QSR customer Snack Box™, it has introduced a groundbreaking workforce management system for remotely managing staff, in-store procedures and daily activities.
The system is notable in that it leverages and integrates new and low-cost technologies, to include secure in-store iPads®; Square™ for cash management and credit card processing; remote device configuration and control; and staff scheduling, timekeeping and task management. In-store “out-of-the-box” deployment can take less than 30 minutes.
Stefan Midford, CEO of Natural Insight stated that “this was the perfect match of a retail industry segment (QSR) seeking improved methods for deploying new technologies into stores, and our firm, that prides itself in offering customers significantly reduced capital investment and shorter lead times than ever seen before.”
Snack Box has opened the first of many planned locations inside Wal-Mart stores and selected Natural Insight as its preferred workforce management solution. This allows centralized oversight of in-store retail execution activity, improved accuracy, accountability and deeper understanding of real-time activity. The new system provides an easily accessed, touch screen communication link to workers that aids in speeding numerous in-store work processes.
Snack Box CEO David Hoodis, an industry veteran, stated that “our ability to deploy quickly and effectively was enabled by working with a single provider of integrated services. Natural Insight brought us not only meaningful innovation in a compressed timeline, but teamed us with an exceptional and professional staff.”
With planned locations in Walmart stores nationwide, a simple unified platform that allowed a consistent level of high quality service across all restaurants was important. All stores receive identical systems, identical training and identical look and feel ensuring that the experience in each store is the same.
In addition to its fully managed and hosted solution, Natural Insight reduces the burden on IT by providing all staging, configuration, and on-going monitoring of the iPads. Delivering on its promise of out-of-the-box task management, Natural Insight can setup the iPads and ship them to stores fully equipped with secured mounts, instructions, and everything the store manager needs to get up-and-running in minutes.
Natural Insight customers benefit from a centralized database across all stores and an ability to drill down to specific activity status that includes verification of work completed as well as outstanding tasks remaining. In addition, retailers are now equipped to provide guidance and work tasks for the day. With careful attention to the user experience and testing of usability Snack Box is able to quickly grow without the need for extensive training or support.
About Snack Box
Snack Box, with planned locations within many Walmart stores, is a quick service restaurant (QSR) that was built from the ground up with 100% focus on putting the customer first. The company operates with a staff of “snackologists” that put an emphasis on quality, service, efficiency and flexibility. Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, Snack Box LLC has teamed with some of the best designers in the industry to identify superior and efficient technologies for food preparation and delivery, allowing for freshness all day. Store managers grow to own equity in the company. Visit www.snackboxusa.com.
About Natural Insight
Natural Insight is a private retail technology company with a distinguishing feature – outstanding user loyalty to the product. The company’s innovative, cloud-based platform significantly improves sales, reduces overhead and provides real-time workforce activity feedback that motivates high performance. Through an integrated suite of solutions focused on scheduling, task management, data reporting and timekeeping, large numbers of workers are empowered to complete assignments with significantly less effort. Providing services across a broad cross-section of the retail industry, Natural Insight is used by major retailers and servicing companies to improve execution and manage in-store merchandising, assisted sales, magazine and book distribution, product demos, and store audits. Visit www.naturalinsight.com.
iPad is a registered trademark of Apple, Inc.
Walmart is a registered trademark of Walmart Stores Inc.
Square is a trademark of Square, Inc.
Snack Box is trademark of Snack Box USA.
Media Contacts:
Stefan Midford, President & CEO
Natural Insight
smidford@naturalinsight.com
800-961-5203
David Hoodis, CEO
Snack Box
David.Hoodis@snackboxusa.com
479-464-4663
FSAstore.com Closes More Than $2 Million Financing
Second round financing led by Originate Ventures includes additional investment from previous investors Point Judith Capital and the Lang Fund of Columbia Business School
NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — FSAstore.com, the only e-commerce site exclusively stocked with Flexible Spending Account (FSA) eligible products and services, closed its second round financing of more than $2 Million. The financing, led by Originate Ventures, includes investment from previous investors Point Judith Capital and Columbia Business School Lang Fund, as well as additional angel investors.
The funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing and development initiatives, as the company continues to expand to meet growing consumer demand for its products and services. FSAstore.com enables consumers with Flexible Spending Accounts to use their tax-free dollars to purchase more than 6,000 healthcare products and browse hundreds of services directly from the website. FSAstore.com partners directly with FSA Administrators (TPAs) to make a wide range of health products, tools, and services directly available to FSA holders.
“We are thrilled that Originate Ventures, a leading early stage investor in the healthcare sector, is joining our existing investors in our latest financing round, which will provide us with the resources necessary to expand our operations to meet the rapidly growing demand for our products and services,” said Jeremy Miller, FSAstore.com founder and president.
“In just two years FSAstore.com has shown impressive results in the development of its TPA network, new product initiatives such as their prescription service, and strong customer satisfaction and retention,” said Glen Bressner, Managing Partner at Originate Ventures. “We look forward to our partnership and to helping the company build toward the next stage of service to TPAs and consumers.”
“The ability to use FSA tax-free income to purchase thousands of high quality healthcare products and services is a tremendous advantage for consumers and an important opportunity for TPAs to meet plan member needs, especially during tough economic times,” said David Martirano, co-founder & general partner at Point Judith Capital. “FSA Store is ideally positioned to expand operations as interest in this purchasing option continues to expand, and we are committed to their long term success.”
About FSAstore.com
FSAstore.com is the only one-stop-ecommerce site exclusively stocked with FSA eligible products and services, eliminating the guesswork regarding what is reimbursable by an FSA. Consumers who have Flexible Spending Accounts can access more than 6,000 high quality FSA eligible products, in addition to FSA eligible services and much needed information through our FSA Learning Center. FSAstore.com accepts all FSA and major credit cards, offers 24/7 customer service, one-to-two-day turnaround for all orders, and free shipping on orders $50+. In addition there is no need to submit receipts for consumers who purchase products on FSAstore.com using an FSA card.
About Originate Ventures
Originate Ventures is a venture capital investment firm, targeting early stage product and services companies located in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic region. The firm focuses on opportunities with medical devices, healthcare, consumer, information technology, Web-based and commercial products. Operating with an entrepreneurial spirit and vision, Originate’s investments range in size from $500,000 to $4,000,000.
We believe our brand building techniques and experience uniquely permit us to accelerate growth and reduce additional capital rounds, allowing founding entrepreneurs to retain more ownership. Our almost three decades of experience, in over 60 categories, also allows us to better identify and assist in creating strong brands. Finally, we take pride in being entrepreneurs first, though the partners have strong track records as business owners and management consultants. http://www.originateventures.com.
About Point Judith Capital
Point Judith Capital (PJC) is a leading early stage venture capital firm based in Boston, MA. The firm focuses on three rapidly growing sectors rich with innovation: Clean Technology, Internet Technology, and Healthcare Technology. Building positive and collaborative relationships with portfolio company management, the Point Judith Capital Partners take a hands-on approach to investing. PJC’s investment approach is based on the core belief that with the right capital and support, great entrepreneurs can build market-leading companies. For more information about Point Judith Capital visit www.pointjudithcapital.com.
Survey by Retail Workforce Management Firm Natural Insight Demonstrates New Critical Success Factor
STERLING, Va. — September 11, 2012 –(BUSINESS WIRE)– Natural Insight, a private retail technology company engaged in workforce management, today announced significant findings in the correlation of user engagement and customer loyalty to company success and growth. In its recent survey, over 84% of users maintain that a workforce management solution cannot be effective without employee support — a compelling statistic that reflects the growing influence of software users on purchase decisions in an increasingly social media world.
Concurrent with the rise in social media and the wide sharing of experience that it allows, corporate enterprises can no longer purchase and implement software technologies in isolation from the users of that technology. When users themselves embrace the technology, superior levels of efficiency and productivity are the result. In this regard, user influence now appears to have reached a tipping point as a critical success factor in corporate purchase decisions.
In a direct correlation to business results, Stefan Midford, President and CEO of Natural Insight stated that “a high level of user engagement is clearly driving our own corporate success: 93% of our users proclaim their support of our product in daily work processes while our most recent quarterly corporate results delivered record revenue growth of 56 % over the prior year. By improving user engagement, we have achieved an extremely high level of user loyalty, and it has become a major differentiator in our marketplace.”
Supporting the powerful impact of employee engagement, Gallup states that organizations with engaged employees show a 3.9x greater EPS compared to low engagement organizations in the same industry. Additionally, KPMG studies show that engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave the organization than those disengaged.
Technology engagement and support from users is no accident. Best practice software development now deliberately embeds features that grab attention, provides real-time feedback on actions and rewards users for high performance and the achievement of milestones. One discipline that has shown rapid growth in software development is the concept of gamification that taps into behavioral patterns users are already familiar with, such as visually appealing interfaces, self learning, graphic success measurement and social interaction.
Effective user engagement has appeal across borders. Natural Insight continues to grow internationally with the addition of new customers in Canada and the Caribbean, sales partner CACI in the UK and the recent addition of German to the list of supported languages. All new customers cite positive user experience as a deciding factor.
The Natural Insight study on user engagement produced significant responses from a statistically valid sample of well over 1,900 users.
About Natural Insight
Natural Insight is a private retail technology company with a distinguishing feature – outstanding user loyalty to the product. The company’s innovative, cloud-based platform significantly improves sales, reduces overhead and provides real-time workforce activity feedback that motivates high performance. Through an integrated suite of solutions focused on scheduling, task management, data reporting and timekeeping, large numbers of workers are empowered to complete assignments with significantly less effort. Providing services across a broad cross-section of the retail industry, Natural Insight is used by major retailers and servicing companies to improve execution and manage in-store merchandising, assisted sales, magazine and book distribution, product demos, and store audits.
Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50399699&lang=en
Contacts
Natural Insight
Stefan Midford, 800-961-5203
smidford@naturalinsight.com
Retail Innovation Expert David Hoodis Accepts Advisory Role; Timing Coincides with Acceleration of Workforce Management Firm in Retail Markets
STERLING, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Natural Insight, a private retail technology company engaged in workforce management, today announced the addition of David Hoodis to its corporate advisory board. A former Wal-Mart and Modell’s Sporting Goods executive, Hoodis is a recognized expert in retail innovation and workforce efficiency. The addition to Natural Insight’s advisory board comes at a time of rapid company expansion in retail markets.
In making the announcement, Stefan Midford, President and CEO of Natural Insight stated that “We feel privileged to have access to David’s respected experience in workforce innovation. His success with numerous leading retailers brings us an added perspective that enables us to stay even further ahead of market need.”
Hoodis remarked that “I have always enjoyed working with companies and products that provide best-in-class solutions. Natural Insight is truly one of those companies with workforce tools second to none in the industry and in providing real value to retailers.”
David Hoodis has served in the number two position at Modell’s Sporting Goods as Executive Vice President. Modell’s is one of the largest sporting goods retailers in the U.S., boasting 151 stores in 10 states and Washington, DC and with over 4,000 associates employed. He also draws upon eight years of experience with Wal-Mart Stores, where as a corporate officer he spanned many roles, to include US store operations where he had responsibility for all day-to-day initiatives, strategic planning and direction, field communication and customer service.
Hoodis joins current advisory board members John Henderson, Rich Moore and John Estrada, all experienced thought leaders in the growth of business technology firms.
About Natural Insight
Natural Insight is a private retail technology company with a distinguishing feature – outstanding user loyalty to the product. The company’s innovative, cloud-based platform significantly improves sales, reduces overhead and provides real-time workforce activity feedback that motivates high performance. Through an integrated suite of solutions focused on scheduling, task management, data reporting and timekeeping, large numbers of workers are empowered to complete assignments with significantly less effort. Providing services across a broad cross-section of the retail industry, Natural Insight is used by major retailers and servicing companies to improve execution and manage in-store merchandising, assisted sales, magazine and book distribution, product demos, and store audits.
Uncertainty Breeds Paralysis
As the recovery continues and delinquency levels normalize, those in our industry would
typically see creditors beginning to turn their attention to process improvement initiatives,
cost reduction strategies and efforts aimed at applying lessons learned from the last three
tumultuous years — but this recovery has been noticeably different.
Instead of the normal activity, this recovery has been overshadowed by the appointment of a new regulatory body and an expected host of new regulations designed to protect consumers. Rather than spending their resources focusing on embracing the latest communication channels and preferences of their customer base, creditors are instead in a “hurry up and wait” mode to deploy process changes aimed at complying with these new regulations — regulations that are, in some cases, hastily defined, and in other cases, still only rumored to be on the way.
Most of us in the industry have known for some time now (and been increasingly frustrated) that the existing regulations have gaping holes in terms of their applicability to the current environment we all face every day. The Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) are well-intentioned legislative attempts to regulate the industry’s practices, but have grown so out of date as to be almost irrelevant. For example, most modern communication technologies aren’t covered, as text messaging, email, mobile phones and auto-dialed or IVR calls weren’t even part of the consumer landscape back then. Still, these regulations are continuously being interpreted by the courts and the new regulatory body. The creditors that have to comply with them face the always-evolving question: “Comply with what?”
Without clarity on how to interpret the laws that are on the books, what our industry is left with is a disarming lack of direction about how to apply the principles of these regulations in the context of the new technologies. A simple matter like calling someone at the number they provided to us in their application becomes a complex issue when that number can be ported to a cell phone for which express consent hasn’t been captured, etc.
Who’s On First?
Contact methods and the number of attempts are far from the only area of regulation to be contended with — fair lending practices, disclosure requirements, verifications of employment and consent are all in play. The overlap between federal rules and aggressive state attorneys general is also unclear: When regulations mandate conflicting actions, which one trumps? When channel communications allowed under one regulation are to be displaced by another, do the old rules apply to the new technology — and if not, who is going to clarify the interpretation of the new technology (something the FCC and FTC have routinely failed to do in the past 30-plus years)? When data on SCRA-eligible borrowers is hard to find, when cell-phone data is unreliable and expensive, when the existence of multiple account relationships for an individual customer changes the nature of the challenge, who is going to interpret how much effort (to comply) is enough?
New Kid on the Block
In 2010, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank bill to address a host of issues across the broader financial services spectrum that led to, or were believed to have exacerbated, the financial crisis of 2008. Also included in that bill was the creation of a new agency, charged with protecting the interest of the consumer — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
Power Corrupts; Do Consumers Have Absolute Power?
In its creation under Dodd-Frank, the CFPB was granted a regulatory remit the likes of which have not been seen before:
> The CFPB has taken over authority for all consumer oriented Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) rules. The OCC retains ‘safety and soundness’ oversight of financial institutions.
> Likewise, CFPB is responsible for all consumer oriented Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules, as well as the supervision and enforcement authority over all consumer-oriented regulations in the financial services arena that were the province of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), including the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 and the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) of 1977.
> In addition to interpreting the current laws and regulations, the CFPB is charged with authoring new rules and regulations that affect consumers across the broadest range of financial industry players possible: banks, mortgage and student lenders, payday lenders and debt collections agencies.
> The most surprising remit of the CFPB, however, is that it is also charged with both the supervision and enforcement actions arising from interpreting the laws and regulations. Adding to the agency’s challenges, it is the CFPB who is also responsible for hearing appeals.
> Here we have a federal regulatory body that is the creator, the interpreter, the supervisor and the final appellate arbiter of the appropriateness of any interaction with the consumer. When combined with the fact that the CFPB has authority to pierce the shield of attorney-client privileged information and is itself exempt from adherence to the tenets of the Freedom of Information Act, it becomes a potentially frightening situation.
No wonder the financial industry is concerned. While the proclamations coming from the CFPB Director so far appear to indicate that the agency is aware of the awe-inspiring power and reach it holds (and is prepared to wield that power judiciously), one can only watch the bureau’s actions to see how this situation will play out. For many financial executives, this uncertainty has caused them to adopt a “wait and see” position.
Alternatively, this can be viewed as a potential source of clarity for the industry. The agency will be a single point of focus that’s charged with solving the cross-agency confusion and resolving many long-standing questions. It is our belief that the winning strategy is a proactive re-evaluation and re-tooling of underlying systems in order to ensure compliance regardless of how the situation develops from here.
Let’s take a look at some of the areas that will be impacted by new regulation in the coming months:
It’s a New Day in Vendor Management
In April the CFPB released an official bulletin regarding service providers. The implications of this bulletin will have significant impact on the industry, as creditors place additional requirements on their agencies to produce documentation and audit responses aligned with the ever-changing regulations coming out of the CFPB.
The cost to comply with ill-defined regulations and then respond to regular examinations will likely force consolidation throughout the Accounts Receivable Management (ARM) industry. These are straight expense line items, without the potential of any off-setting revenue gains — a deadly combination for any employer that operates under tight margins to begin with.
Because the regulations are not well defined, it means that financial institutions will be forced to develop their own interpretations. The implication for agencies is a multitude of “standards” that actually vary slightly from contract to contract. This variation will drive significant overhead costs as reporting and compliance must be customized for each client.
So what does this mean for your business? We all understand that the financial health of our service providers is critical to their ability to provide effective collection results. If they have to expend energy and overhead on generating reports and responding to an ever increasing line of auditors at their door, then their ability to maintain collections performance will be tested.
Audits are required — agencies must be secure and treat their confidential information with safety and integrity. The cost of security is one that every business in the industry understands and appreciates; however, it is the costs expended to placate a multitude of interpretations in a variety of manners that will ultimately drive the costs up exponentially.
While We Wait
Most large scale agencies have been working under stringent security requirements for quite some time. Clients have long held service providers to a very strict code of conduct when it comes to compliance and security. What is different now is the level of responsibility the CFPB is placing on the financial institutions for the service providers’ conduct.
A thorough evaluation of each service provider, while expensive for both parties, is essential to ensure your exposure is limited and the proper precautions are being taken. The ability to maintain control of data, and to monitor compliance in real time, will be a critical step forward. The long-standing industry standard practice of distributing inventory to a variety of service providers may be nearing its end. Technology has progressed to the point that there is no compelling limitation that would keep a business from providing access to the data within their existing, approved, secure data centers rather than shipping the data out to a variety of locations on a daily basis and receiving/reconciling individual variations between what was sent and what was returned.
The benefit of a controlled collections and recovery environment go beyond compliance monitoring and enforcement. This is one area that may ultimately yield benefits from both cost and performance standpoints. Inventory management is an expensive endeavor. By eliminating the expense line items associated, creditors can re-direct resources to more performance-impacting practices. In addition, the ability to set strategy and quickly make strategic changes intra-day will yield significant increases to liquidation rates. Depending on your solution set, you may even be able to provide access to communication channels like texting, web self-service and email that you have previously been unable to allow from a purely outsourced standpoint.
Get Back to Business, Confident You Comply
It isn’t just the changes in the service provider expectations impacting the industry. Understanding the challenges posed by the evolving regulatory environment is one thing— being able to comply with what one knows is being asked is yet another entirely. Yet, the only way for executive management to be certain of success in significantly reducing reputational risk is:
> to re-take control over not just the strategy but the operational execution of the collections strategy;
> to maintain transparency in reporting and communication to all parties;
> to do so in a way that is provable not only to regulators but to internal management, in order to facilitate positive changes when needed;
> to ensure you have the flexibility needed to adjust on-the-fly to the rapid-fire changes in regulations, interpretations, and customer behavior data.
Get Control Over Offers, Channel Attempts and Touchpoints
In order to achieve compliance, you must be able to make sure that the internal and external contact strategies are all executed in accordance with the strategist’s design. This process includes covering the number of total attempts by device or channel (home, work or cell); by address; within specific periods of time and to specifically-allowed responsible parties; programs offered and the disclosures associated with each interaction. This is only possible if the execution component of the operation can be controlled by the strategist’s design. In order to provide that level of control, all of the data and strategies are best managed within a single source that is not subject to operational decisions made outside the strategist’s view.
What is at stake is the ability to maintain a flexible but compliant environment, which requires a fundamental re-balancing of power. If the system allows operational changes that can violate the strategy (and if they can, they will), you risk non-compliant behavior. The trade-off, of course, is that limiting freedom to adjust strategies on-the-fly can impact performance. As a result, freedom must be maintained in a single controlled environment in order to ensure that both compliance and performance goals are exceeded.
Maintain Transparency
The ability to control the operational execution in accordance with the strategists’ design is rendered truly powerful by the ability to see both the strategy and its execution in real-time, with both being able to change on-the-fly in response to data as it is received. Yet equally important is the need to be able to re-create exactly what is happening, has happened, and will happen so that there is no mystery in giving over control to the strategists. This ability is fundamental to the next item, but also necessary in order to provide control in a way that is acceptable to both operational managers and strategists.
Provability for Audit Purposes
The upside to giving operations and strategists visibility of the strategy-to-operations connection is that we can then allow compliance officers, auditors and regulators that same visibility. It is crucial that reports are easily available to prove what has been done, what is being done and what will be done. This is the flip side of the transparency issue: in order to be able to see clearly what is happening, and why it happens that way so that it can be modified as needed in day-to-day operations, the same is true after the-fact for provability. Only a system that provides the control necessary to transparently manage all aspects of a compliant operation will be able to provide the same level of reporting across all those aspects.
Flexibility — The Least Appreciated, but Most Important Attribute
Given the challenges posed in providing control, transparency, and provability across all components that need to be managed (channels, appropriate responsible party conversations, work/home/mobile addresses, offers, disclosures, etc.), one would be forgiven for thinking that a solution that offers these would be sufficient. The problem is, this isn’t a static problem and is subject to daily change given our currently-evolving regulatory environment.
The upshot of the above is that a system devised to ensure compliance must, first and foremost, be designed with flexibility and adaptability built-in. Anything less will provide a short-term win, at best, but more likely will be obsolete before it even goes into production. This is precisely what happened at a large retail banking organization that specified its online collections component prior to a regulatory change. The result was a nearly two-year development effort that had to be shelved because the end product had not anticipated or architected for the constant evolutionary changes that would be needed.
Subject-Matter Expertise is Not Optional
Which leads to the final element of flexibility: subject- matter expertise in collections and credit risk. Without it, an IT-driven solution will founder on the rocks of regulatory complexity and potential overlap, and the deployment will far short of the degrees of freedom necessary to anticipate future changes in requirements. While putting a business-savvy resource on your development team is better than nothing, it is actually more important to make sure that the solution architect him/herself has the business understanding required to ensure the solution will scale, not only to the potential complexities and contradictory requirements, but also to the level of change that has to be accommodated by the solution.
Scenarios to Ponder: Different “Levels of the game”
Customer versus Account versus Responsible Party
All of the above-mentioned challenges exist for each individual account managed at the product or portfolio level. Who you can speak with, how many times you can attempt to contact them, where you can contact them within a given time frame, and what you are required to disclose — all of these factors can vary by geography in ways that make things difficult from a systems point of view. The state of Massachusetts, for example, mandates that place of employment must be verified on a regular schedule before proceeding with contact attempts. Other states require that only the principal accountholder be counted as a right party, and even their spouses are deemed third parties — all things your system needs to “know” and convey to agents.
Also, it is worth noting that regulators are less interested in how systems were built to work and more interested in the customer experience impact. Regulators ask “why is it so hard to treat a customer consistently and sensitively across all elements (e.g. products) of their relationship with a lender?” That expectation is not unfair, but it may be when asked about current systems that weren’t architected with that goal in mind.
Defining Contacts, Attempts and Resolutions
Another complexity is that an “attempt” has been traditionally defined as a phone call, and “contact” has been defined as a Right Party Contact (RPC). “Resolution” means the past-due amount has been paid to current, or that a payment program has been created that will bring them current when it is executed. Unfortunately, those traditional definitions are subject to change: The Irish government, for example, has mandated that collectors could make no more than three attempts — letters, telephone dials, emails and text messages all count — within a 30-day window. While it’s unlikely that our regulators will compare notes with theirs, the day is not far off when any medium of contact will count as an attempt, and the definition of contact may expand as well. For instance, is an authenticated Web visit any different from an inbound call? Our industry will need to be prepared for that possibility, as well as the notion that any future scheduled payments must be considered a resolution unless it can be clearly demonstrated that the payments do not meet the proper criteria and that the borrower has been so notified.
“Contact Compliance” or “Disclosure Compliance” or “Operational Policy Compliance”
Different requirements between states and the federal regulations used to be manageable by adhering to the OCC’s guidance as pre-empting any conflicts, but that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore. States are now able to — and seem increasingly comfortable with —going their own way in setting their own rules for contacts, disclosures and policies. The state of Washington, for example, mandates that customer contacts be limited to three times within a specified period but only one of those contacts can be to the place of employment (POE). Massachusetts, as mentioned above, mandates POE verification more regularly than the Federal government or other states require. Navigating these various requirements — even just keeping track of which states require what specific contact, disclosure and operational actions and reports — represents a nearly full-time responsibility. As mentioned in the previous section, just meeting the requirements isn’t sufficient: one has to be able to prove that operations are compliant to the regulators’ satisfaction. Muddling forward “as best one can” in the hope that they don’t ask to see proof simply isn’t an acceptable strategy.
The Conclusion: Compliance Automation is Your Best Option
Ensuring agents only talk to the right people, at the right time, with the right offer and disclosures within each geography can only effectively be controlled when the strategists’ rules for contacts, offers and disclosures are consistently and uniformly followed. Operational managers, who need freedom in order to operate efficiently, can be effective while remaining compliant only if the rules and requirements are incorporated into the operational execution capability they use to manage their staff’s efforts, from dialer-based campaigns to manual or preview-dial calling efforts. Inbound contacts must be incorporated into the strategy set for decisioning the next contact across all touch points, or the effort to control all outbound calls will have been for naught.
Similarly, the addition of digital channels such as IVR, email, text and Web can only be executed in a compliant manner if the strategists’ central control point is maintained. That isn’t possible through printed “cheat-sheets” for agents – rather, a fully-automated solution that incorporates rules-based contact attempts across all channels, including fully informing agents of the current status of a customer and even preventing call (or other channel) attempts to borrowers who have reached the “maximum-allowed-threshold” status is necessary. On top of that, one must add the individualized offer and disclosure requirements and ensure that all content (whether conveyed in digital messages, letters or agent phone calls) is compliant before executive management can be confident that reputational risk has been mitigated.
That is the goal, and it is unlikely to be achieved without the help of fully automated solution that provides the control, the transparency, the provability and the flexibility mandated by today’s complex regulatory environment. Only then can collections executives stay on top of the wave instead of being crushed by it.