Why we rebuilt a collection agency around AI agents

Every collection agency runs on software, and almost all of that software shares a flaw: it was built by software people who never collected a dollar. The workflows assume collections is a call-center problem—dial more, log more, escalate on a timer. Anyone who has actually moved a six-figure commercial balance knows better.

Real commercial recovery is an information problem. The collector who knows the debtor's funding history, their litigation record, their actual decision-maker, and the weak points in their dispute wins the negotiation before it starts. The collector reading from a queue loses. The constraint was always the hours in a skilled collector's day: every hour spent skip-tracing or assembling a dispute file was an hour not spent negotiating.

What the agents actually do

We're one of the first agencies to run agentic AI through the whole back office. In our shop, AI agents handle skip-tracing and asset research, build dispute documentation from contracts and usage logs, score accounts for collectability, and run follow-up cadences that never forget and never get bored. Every output lands in front of a veteran collector who decides what to do with it.

The result isn't "AI collections"—nobody's balance gets negotiated by a chatbot. The result is that our collectors walk into every negotiation over-prepared, on day two instead of week three. That's most of the story behind our 23.6-day average resolution, which runs about 41% faster than the industry.

Why this matters to your finance team

Speed compounds in collections. Receivables are perishable—recovery odds fall every month an account ages. An agency that resolves in three weeks instead of three months isn't just more convenient; it's collecting at a higher point on the decay curve. The machine handles the paperwork. The human applies the pressure. You get paid sooner.

And this is just the operating layer. The bottlenecks we've removed internally point at a bigger project: collection software designed by people who have actually collected. Watch this space.