Eltropy, an AI-powered conversations platform for community financial institutions (CFIs), has revealed how it is helping credit unions and community banks across North America reduce the number of delinquencies they experience.
Eltropy explained that by deploying its unified text messaging service, AI-powered chatbots, secure video banking, and voice capabilities, it enabled members to easily make payments via text and engage with them through digital channels.
The platform is able to help CFIs establish early connections to avoid missed payments and costly delinquencies. Eltropy explained that its AI-driven chat and voice solutions also enable empathetic, personal outreach at scale.
In 2023, North America saw a significant spike in delinquencies – partly driven by the lending industry extending larger amounts of credit to a greater number of borrowers during the pandemic years, based on historically high credit scores and low debt levels at the time. When economic conditions normalised and consumers spent their surplus savings, the number of defaults increased.
Ashish Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eltropy
Ashish Garg, co-founder and CEO of Eltropy, discussed the need for action: “Reducing delinquencies is a top priority for our community bank and credit union clients in today’s economic environment.
“Our unified conversations platform makes it easy to deploy timely payment reminders, digital payment flows, AI-powered conversations, and seamless handoffs to live agents when needed. For years, this multi-channel approach has been proving highly effective for increasing on-time payments and working with members to resolve delinquent accounts.”
Members ‘open up their hearts on text’
By providing purpose-built digital communications tools, Eltropy hopes to empower community financial institutions to reduce delinquencies through more effective member engagement throughout the collections lifecycle.
Lisa Weinstein, VP of member relationship product management at Virginia Credit Union, explained how the using solutions has helped drive a reduction in delinquencies: “Using Eltropy texting for our collections and recovery departments, we’re collecting way more than ever before in our history.
“We immediately saw results after implementing Eltropy. By sending delinquent payment reminders via text messaging with payment links, we had a record-breaking collections year in 2021, collecting $48.3million and recovering $9.9million in principal from charged-off loans, and we continue to see these positive results year after year.”
Shawn Spratte, SVP of loss mitigation and communications center at Canvas Credit Union, also explained the impact of meeting members on their preferred digital channels: “Our members would almost never pick up our collections calls – but opened up their hearts on text.”
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