Recovery

Organizers of the North American Repossessors Summit (NARS) have announced the opening of nominations for their second annual Industry Awards. Designed to honor exemplary repossession professionals, this year’s award categories include Recovery Agent of the Year, Service Representative of the Year, Humanitarian of the Year and Agency Owner of the Year.

NARS officials said submissions can be made until March 6. The NARS committee will choose the top three nominations in each category before opening voting to the public to select winners.

“All nominees will be carefully vetted based on the quality and detail of submission and their contributions to the repossession industry,” officials said.

The awards categories are as follows:

Recovery Agent of the Year

The Agent of the Year Award honors the agent who has demonstrated outstanding professionalism, understanding of lender needs and full compliance with industry standards, as well as protection of the consumer's rights and safety.

Service Representative of the Year

The Service Representative of the Year Award represents someone who has shown exemplary performance and has consistently excelled in their position. This person demonstrates integrity, creates a positive atmosphere in their workplace, and displays a strong commitment to the mission and values of our industry.

Humanitarian of the Year

Humanitarian of the Year submissions showcase an industry professional of any position who contributes significantly to alleviating human suffering and improving the quality of life in their community. This person demonstrates leadership through outstanding volunteer accomplishments that bring honor to the collateral recovery profession.

Agency Owner of the Year

Finally, the Agency Owner of the Year Award will go to an owner who has at least a three-year commitment of excellence within their company and the collateral recovery industry. This person should also be able to document their commitment to professional education and compliance training as well as the use of innovation and creativity in enabling their company to prosper and extend its reach in the collateral recovery profession.

To submit someone for an industry award, go to reposummit.com.

This week, Resolvion, released a new specialty suite of services. 

The skip-tracing and repossession management firm explained these specialty services were designed to address many of the challenges that finance companies encounter in their repossession activities. 

Resolvion’s specialty services include the following programs:

• Rural area recovery

• Bankruptcy recovery

• Red Flag/Cease and desist Recovery

• Impound recovery

• Native American Reservation Recovery

Resolvion president Josh Elias indicated these unique programs will support Resolvion’s existing core repossession services.

“Our specialty services are designed to address major pain points for our clients while reducing overall costs and risks,” Elias said in a news release. “This was a major initiative that took a lot of resources to successfully implement so we’re excited to introduce it to our clients.

For more information about Resolvion’s specialty services, finance companies can contact Jose Mendiola at jose.mendiola@alsresolvion.com or call (954) 931-2848.

Recovery professionals that conduct activities in Massachusetts now have another training opportunity to maintain their compliance knowledge.

RISC recently launched the Massachusetts-specific collateral recovery training course as part of its CARS National Certification Program. The compliance services company emphasized that continually providing up-to-date training on state-mandated regulations is the goal of RISC.

“It’s crucial to let the industry know about updated regulations and provide comprehensive training for collateral recovery in Massachusetts and beyond,” RISC chief executive officer Stamatis Ferarolis said in a news release.

“We are committed to providing these updates and have hired the prestigious law firm, Hudson Cook, to help design the most current training programs in the nation,” continued Ferarolis, who also mentioned RISC will continue to evolve with the industry by building courses that will provide value to both clients and recovery agents.

Steve Digantgikis, owner of New England Adjustment Bureau, offered his assessment of how this RISC training can help. Digantgikis was the first operator to become certified through this Massachusetts-specific CARS program.

“The overview of Massachusetts regulations is very informative,” Digantgikis said. “It’s another great addition to RISC’s current CARS program to keep my recovery staff safe and knowledgeable.”

RISC highlighted the CARS certification is accepted by many domestic lending institutions and is completed by more than 4,000 recovery professionals annually. The course is available on RISC’s education platform for purchase at this website.

Editor’s note: This commentary is the first in a series compiled by Joel Kennedy, who is the current president of the National Automotive Finance Association and chief operating officer at TruDecision, looking at the intricacies of repossessions and recovery.

The industry that locates borrowers and collateral, recovers collateral and handles liquidation on behalf of lenders has grown significantly in the last five to 10 years. Forwarders present lenders a streamlined way to manage recoveries, liquidations and vendor compliance, as a result of their configuration and focus on technology and innovation improvements to the process. During this time, lenders have seen the value in the forwarder model, resulting in the growth of this industry, and now — forwarder consolidation. The most impacted players in this new world are the recovery agents, and the recovery industry is feeling the economic squeeze, and recovery agents are suffering, or worse shuddering up.

The National Automotive Finance Association along with the American Recovery Association have facilitated working sessions between both lenders and recovery agents for the past few years — with the goal of driving standards within the industry that will benefit all players, and create an environment where recovery agents can once again thrive. Last year, the top forwarders in the industry got together and are actively involved in leading this initiative to a lasting result.

As someone involved in this initiative since 2018, and now as the president of the NAF Association, I wanted to get into the details of the skip / recovery space to better understand the lender’s challenges and the solutions that are available for them. To get educated, I embedded myself for some time within the operations of Flying A Information Resources, a skip / locate and recovery company. The results of my learnings are captured within a three-part editorial series on the fundamentals of skip and recovery. I would be remiss if I did not thank CEO Dick Landeis and president Jim Snead of Flying A Information Resources, for supporting this initiative and opening Flying A’s doors and process to me. 

Improving Skip-tracing Results

In Disney’s “The Mandalorian,” the client says that “Bounty hunting is a complicated profession,” and provides the main character, a bounty hunter nicknamed “Mando” with only limited information in his pursuit of a bounty. The bounty hunter works solo and has to rely on his own skill and cunning to locate and capture the bounty. This Mandalorian is a specialist, a professional bounty hunter that his peers hate due to his success at catching elusive bounties that have frustrated and confounded them all.

Just as the Mandalorian is brought in when all other possibilities are exhausted, so too is the world of locating borrowers and collateral that have evaded you — also known as skip-tracing. I happen to believe that the seeds of the problems are sewn early on in the business setup. Auto lenders build up the detailed economic forecast and budget, and most of the focus is on stressing the model relative to revenue and losses. We tend not to spend too much time on the particular underlying people, process, and technology required to deliver on the details of plan. As a result, big dollar recovery processes like late-stage collections, skip, impound, vehicle in shop, and deep-skip tend to be cobbled together as afterthoughts.

Far too often it is “too little, too late.” We’ve all seen the scenario of some “pointy haired boss” lambasting the head of collections for a growing list of uncollectable accounts. So, as ops folks, we react by taking immediate action. Get the car, find the borrower, do whatever it takes to get the job done — fees and overtime be damned. Just find a local skip / recovery specialist and assign the case on the double (skipping all sensible vendor due diligence). Equally as detrimental is the fact that the decision whether to build the intelligence internally or outsource is oftentimes based less on considering the strategic elements, and more on the ego of the collections VP or the CEO.

The Challenges

From the smallest to the largest automotive lenders, the challenges are common:

—Challenge No. 1: I can’t locate my borrower.

There are skip accounts in every stage of delinquency, but they tend to get noticed when they start rolling into the 31 days past due bucket. The focus in the earlier stages of delinquency (say anything prior to 61 days or more past due) tends to be more on locating the borrower and trying to help get them back on track, and collections tends to utilize a standard set of borrower outreach tools that escalate as you trip different days past due triggers. So, the phone calls, text messages, and emails continue, while possibly layering in more mail, collectors refer back to the loan package and start calling references, possibly running an updated skip report, and maybe issuing a field call. How well focused and measured these efforts are can vary on the level of management, rigor and controls in place, and this can have a bearing on the results.

—Challenge No. 2: I can’t locate my vehicle.

As a delinquent account ages, the focus on finding the collateral takes central focus. Locating a vehicle when the borrower has changed jobs, residence, possibly even moving out of state can be tricky. Most recovery agents can conduct some skip tracing to provide more information for the case. If your collateral is equipped with a GPS, you can do some skip tracing there (even if the device was tampered with), and if you subscribe to a license plate recognition (LPR), that can be another source of leads.

—Challenge No. 3: I have deep skip accounts that are at a dead-end, and I am battling against the clock and charging off.

Deep skips are those skip accounts that have been worked but are unresolved. They may have been worked internally, and also by an outside skip agency, or even a repossessor, with no result. Deep skips tend to get thrown over to skip / forwarders from time to time, and lenders figure this is a no-lose proposition to find either the collateral, the borrower, or both. Assuming that the borrower is so many payments behind that getting reinstated is not really an option, locating the collateral is the first step towards recovering the vehicle and liquidating at auction.

—Challenge No. 4: My operations are not skilled at skip=tracing.

Skip-tracing is definitely a skill and an art. You are looking for patterns in publicly available data, customer provided data, and special data sources (like skip reporting tools, legal records, bureaus, etc). The tools are far from a silver bullet, you still need your skip analyst to be able to make sense of all of the information in front of them, and be selective in what additional data is needed to fill in the picture. Further, there are quite a few areas of compliance that need to be addressed when, say, calling borrowers’ place of employment, or their provided references, or known family identified from skip / bureau tools. Building this up from scratch will require some measure of expertise, most likely at the manager level, and the time and resources required to train the team up. For smaller lenders, you can run into situations of inefficiency where you will need to staff and train more than one person to make sure that you have coverage when the person is out or decides to leave the company.

—Challenge No. 5: Skip tools are expensive, and managing the cost and utilization is difficult.

There are many skip tools out in the marketplace. Speak to any experienced skip tracer and they will be happy to provide you with their favorite techniques and resources, but for the most part, they will tell you that you are likely to be using various resources until the point that you find a missing piece to your puzzle. So, in the context of trying to control and manage costs, this can be problematic. If the list of skips grows, it is easy for management to say “pull out all the stops, run every skip report you can.” The CFO sees that expense line grow (after the fact), and now your skip tracers are constrained to run fewer reports.

—Challenge No 6: I don’t have a path to develop skip tracing skillset internally.

As outlined in Challenge No. 4, you need some expertise internally to either staff or train your skip resources. In cases where that skill set is not readily available, lenders often lack the requisite path to stand up a successful skip team. This can not only be costly, but quite daunting a task, and time consuming — potentially taking your eye off the ball in other areas where management needs to be actively engaged.

In summary, many lenders struggle with locating their skipped borrowers, and vehicles. They may not possess the path or skillset in-house to positively resolve the situation. The cost to address the gap in skip capabilities can be expensive to resolve, and in the learning phases the cost of running redundant, superfluous reports can only set you back further with the internal turmoil that will ensue.

The Solutions

The issues we outlined exist in some measure at most lenders. There are strategic and financial considerations, understanding your company’s risk tolerance, comfort with compliance, and a variety of other factors to consider in how best to approach gaps in skip tracing performance. Thinking in the most basic terms, there are three possible outcomes that can resolve these gaps:

1. Build the Capability Internally

Building skip capability internally can be a good idea, provided you have a path to acquire (or develop) the team to deliver results, and do so safely with consumer rights and compliance central to your controls. Additionally, the cost of running the variety of skip tools is something that needs to be well-managed and tightly controlled if you don’t want end of month “surprises” for your CFO. Ideally, as a skip function grows and matures, there should be ways to train this skillset into your collections staff (particularly the late-stage group, where the lines between collections and skip are blurred) and extend your ability to locate and resolve skips earlier in the process. These are real benefits, and can be realized if you have a clear path, and are willing to make the investment in time and money.

2. Outsource Broadly

The last decade saw a substantial increase in the proliferation of, and increased market share of skip specialists and forwarders. These outsourcing partners can take your skip activity when assigned and manage the entire process. Lender clients will want to clearly establish their expectations for receiving updates with good content and frequency. You will get the benefit of having a managed process, with streamlined process flow, and if you can integrate the data back in to your core (loan servicing) system, you can make it faster and easier for collectors, and recovery specialists to act quickly and not drop the ball. Beyond the core components of service delivery, outsourcing of skip can open each of your assignments to a variety of data sources and skip tools that are constantly changing, each of which costs money to run. A perfect example of this is tapping into LPR analytics (i.e. have we seen this car before on prior scans?), and posting these vehicles into a live status in LPR, opening them up for not only skip, and locate, but if the client wishes — also recovery.

As already mentioned, the market for outsourced skip and subsequent processes (recovery, disposal, etc.) has grown significantly in recent years. To lender clients, the simplicity of managing all skips (and beyond) through a single or handful of vendors is an attractive option to managing all aspects of skip cases directly. If a lender truly has a solid leader and grasp of skip to the point where they will consistently outperform an outsourced option, and do so at a cheaper cost, then by all means. There are many lenders that do just this, just as there is an ever-growing portion that opt to outsource. The fact is that results and performance can change over time, and performing routine comparisons of the results and cost of achieving those results is something that I always advocate.

Which leads us to our final option.

3. Outsource Partially / Specific Elements

In non-prime auto, while there are several large, national players, for the most part the industry is characterized as fragmented, with a majority of smaller regional participants. Sometimes due to smaller volumes, managing the process internally and directly can be the best option. Problems can however crop up when a borrower goes outside of the lenders’ geographic footprint. Lenders may need to engage new skip and repo companies that operate in these “out of footprint” areas, leading to the assignment of skips and repos out to forwarders that have already established relationships with providers that have been vetted for process, compliance, etc.

Another reason why companies may outsource some (but not all) skips would be that they have arrived at a point where they are at a dead-end. Sending these to an outside party to crack the case is a way to keep things moving.

What I do encourage in cases like these would be to create a learning loop with the outside vendor that allows your internal skip tracers to learn and grow. Industry veteran and expert, Dick Landeis, CEO of Flying A Information Resources said, “The best thing a lender can do is get the skip accounts to your skip agent earlier. There is nothing gained from letting an account age.”

Jim Snead, the president of Flying A Information Resources added, “Like many skip agencies, we will tend to see accounts that have been worked 2 or 3 times by recovery agents that don’t specialize in skip, and are flipped over to us. We are always happy to help, but I can tell you that in most cases, had we gotten the account sooner, we would have solved the case quicker, resulting in higher recovery dollars to the lender client.”

So, I am not the only one that thinks “the sooner the better” when it comes to case submission — so identify the dead-ends sooner and you help the vendor out and yourself with better results. It ultimately increases overall client satisfaction, and results, and the vendor will always have new data sources / methods that will keep them relevant and not losing future business because of it. A win-win.

Measuring Results

While we discussed the virtues of lenders looking outside for help to generate improvements, at the end of the day what matters are the results. We ultimately want to move the needle on the results, irrespective of whether they came internally or externally (of course cost of getting the results needs to be considered). At the end of the day, the metrics we want to move are:

• Reduction in delinquency

• Reduction in skip accounts

• Improved skip performance

• Improved recovery rates from skip efforts appending more reliable, up-to-date whereabouts of your collateral and customer

• Reduced losses

• Streamlined operations, faster management of your issues with accountability

As a former operator of more than 20 years, I can tell you that there is always something new that you can do, some new technique, or some outside service that you can employ that will make all the difference and you think “why didn’t I do this sooner?” To me, the big key with all of this is keeping an open mind, not allowing management hubris get the better of you, and openly testing and evaluating options that impact your business configuration.

Acknowledgment

I would be remiss if I did not thank Dick Landeis and Jim Snead of Flying A Information Resources, for supporting this initiative and opening Flying A’s doors and process to me.

Joel Kennedy is chief operating officer of TruDecision. As president of the National Automotive Finance Association, Joel is passionate about growing and improving auto finance ecosystem. Joel has more than 24 years’ experience helping big banks down to start-up finance companies to build, grow, improve, and repeat. Joel can be reached at (240) 308-2169 or joel.kennedy@trudecision.com.

Resolvion — the newly formed provider of loss mitigation services stemming from the recent merger of ALS Resolvion and Del Mar Recovery Solutions — added a well-known executive to its board.

Resolvion announced on Wednesday that Tim Russi, former vice chairman of Ally Auto Finance, has joined the company’s board of directors.

Russi joins Resolvion after having spent 10 years at Ally where he was responsible for all aspects of the auto finance and remarketing businesses.  Prior to joining Ally, he was the president of Bank of America’s Dealer Financial Services.  He has also been active with the American Financial Services Association, including its Vehicle Finance committee and the overall board of directors.

“We are thrilled to have an executive with Tim’s experience in the auto finance industry join our board of directors,” Resolvion chief executive officer Michael Levison said in a news release. “He has a long track record of helping companies develop a clear strategic vision and guiding it's execution.”

“We expect that he will play a strong role as we seek to broaden our capabilities and continue to grow our business,” Levison continued.

Russi wound down his tenure with Ally in October 2018.

“I am looking forward to working with the Resolvion leadership team to help build a truly outstanding service business,” Russi said. “With our recent merger with Del Mar, we are well positioned to become the industry leader.”

Coming on the heels of multiple discussions during Used Car Week 2019 about improving efficiencies during the recovery process, a pair of KAR Global business units rolled out key platform enhancements meant to accomplish that objective.

Recovery Database Network (RDN) and Clearplan announced a pair of “innovative” improvements on Tuesday designed to enable better account management for both finance companies and recovery agents.

According to a news release, the features include standardized data fields for updates, making data entry more efficient for agents and providing much-needed clarity to the thousands of daily updates between agents and finance companies.

Furthermore, a real-time geostamping feature for agent updates adds transparency by confirming the location of the agent at the time of the update, according to the companies.

“RDN and Clearplan are committed to continuously making enhancements, and these new features enable our clients to leverage the latest technology and take control of their data,” said Justin Zane, president of RDN and Clearplan. “Keeping up with the more than 500,000 text messages sent each day has been nearly impossible for agents and lenders, but having standardized updates enables them to extract more value from field data and operations.

“Reporting is significantly enhanced, leading to efficiency, better decision making and ultimately more profitability for lenders and agents alike,” Zane continued.

Recovery agents can utilize the new features on both the RDN platform and the Clearplan app. Finance companies can interact with the augmented data points on the RDN platform.

The Check-In Update field and the New Address Discount field can provide drop-down lists of standard status updates, focusing on actionable data. Choosing from a list of options instead of typing in a free-form text response can save “priceless time for the agent and results in clear, unambiguous updates,” the companies said.

Furthermore, RDN and Clearplan believe finance companies can experience substantial advantage from cleaner, more purposeful data.

“Both agents and lenders benefit from the ability to filter and sort through more easily decipherable updates, extracting valuable data points and flagging items that require action,” the companies said.

Finally, RDN and Clearplan explained the geostamping functionality can measure the distance between the agent and the recovery address and can automatically mark where the agent is located when the update is entered, for complete transparency between agent and finance company.

For more than 10 years, RDN’s software-as-a-service technology has been designed to deliver improved recovery performance and increased operational efficiency for finance companies while providing full security and transparency.

Similarly, Clearplan’s digital platform can provide recovery agents, drivers, forwarders and finance companies with a centralized, mobile, cloud-based hub for repossession workflow and logistics management.

Together, Clearplan and RDN, both business units of KAR Global, can connect thousands of recovery agents and finance companies to a streamlined vehicle recovery process — “with reduced redundancies and increased actionable data.”

For more information, visit recoverydatabase.net.

A founding member of the Automotive Intelligence Council is making a segment of its business available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

On Monday, MBSi Corp., announced the broadening of its technical customer support hours to help clients that use its repossession assignment management software and vendor compliance solutions at all times of the day.

The company said the MBSi customer success team now will be available around the clock to help all customers.

MBSi explained that it launched additional support hours to provide coverage for potential issues as further commitment to the success of all clients which closely aligns with the company’s central theme: “Driven to Serve You Better.”

MBSi president Cort DeHart elaborated about the strategy in a news release.

“We understand the asset recovery industry operates outside of normal business hours and we took the necessary steps to be the first to market with around the clock support ensuring all of our clients — lenders, forwarders and agents – have the back-end support needed to successfully manage their business,” DeHart said.

“We need to be available when our clients need us. With 24/7 support, our customer success team will be available to deliver best-in-class support them,” he went on to say.

While the overall automotive industry might be relatively healthy, no doubt there are dealerships struggling with aged inventory, auctions stressed to keep commercial consignors satisfied and finance companies wringing their hands over compressed margins and wavering portfolio performances.

But if you would please indulge me for a couple of moments to convey what’s happening in what I contend is the most difficult segment for any individual or company to navigate in the automotive space — vehicle repossession.

Reputable repossession agencies want to complete the unenviable task of taking back vehicles when contract holders fail to stay current on payments.

But as Les McCook of the American Recovery Association clearly laid out during the Innovations in Recovery Summit hosted by ALS Resolvion in late September, the dire straits repo agents now are encountering are unprecedented and could make the prospect of getting your collateral back all the more challenging.

“In the next 24 months, there will be significant changes in the industry,” McCook began during his time behind the lectern of this well-orchestrated event by ALS Resolvion. Competitors shared speaking time in front of attendees, who all arrived from organizations vying to remain successful.

For the next 10 minutes, McCook spelled out a host of challenges repossession agents now encounter. Now before you dust off the notion by thinking that’s what McCook should do as the executive director of an association, please consider some of the matters he mentioned.

McCook indicated repossession agents are down to just two possible providers for liability insurance — one of the most important and expensive parts of their operational functions. And McCook said one of those providers is seriously considering the notion of no longer covering repo agencies as the commercial insurance world is having its challenges, too.

“The commercial auto insurance segment is headed to its ninth straight year of underwriting losses. When you stop and think about that, that’s a devastating number. We cannot bring a new insurance company. We literally are hanging on to one by a thread right now because we have been creative and finding solutions,” McCook said.

“There’s a possibility that an insurance carrier will not even cover industry in California in the next year and half,” he added.

McCook noted there are 67 fewer licensed repo agents in California than there were just three years ago. In Florida, the number of licensed agents is down 23% during that span.

Be it in California, Florida or any location in between, what McCook discussed next gave me pause as to how truly challenging — and dangerous — repossessing vehicles can be. And I’m not referring to an irate contract holder storming out of a residence or workplace brandishing a weapon as an agent is trying to recover the collateral.

Before the ALS Resolvion event, McCook asked ARA members to send pictures of vehicle conditions and the personal property within these units from assignments completed in just the previous five days. McCook flashed a couple of pictures on the presentation screen. To say they were graphic is an understatement.

Spoiled food, illegal drug paraphernalia, soiled hygiene products and containers of elements likely from the entire periodic table were just some of visible material. And as McCook pointed out, repo agents are mandated by federal and state regulations either to store or appropriately dispose of that property. And oftentimes, agents must do it without much compensation, if any at all.

McCook asked attendees, “Do you know in California, you have to have a whole separate, fireproof container to hold toxic waste materials that are found in automobiles? And how many of you think there is toxic waste in these cars? Have you thought about that? Have you thought about what the liability could be?”

He added about the images he received from ARA members, “The things that I got back in just within five days were just unbelievable.”

“This is a cost burden that I don’t think being considered into a marketplace. And again, if you want to keep the viability of the business model that we’re in today, someone has to stop and pay attention to what’s happening on the other side of the fence, that what hardship are you putting on them, what burden you are putting on them that they cannot have a sustainable relationship with your company long term,” McCook went on to say.

No doubt, answers to these challenges require more than just throwing money at the problem. McCook probably said it best: “That’s why these meetings and discussions are going to be very important in the near term to have success and viability in the long run.”

Nick Zulovich is senior editor at Cherokee Media Group and can be reached at nzulovich@cherokeemediagroup.com.

Finance companies that use Recovery Database Network (RDN) now have some additional assurance their repossessions are being completed according to state and federal regulations.

On Wednesday, the KAR Global business unit rolled out a seamless application interaction with the American Recovery Association (ARA) that is designed to provide RDN customers instant access to recovery agents’ compliance status.

Both RDN and ARA insisted this additional visibility into real-time information offers increased confidence when considering an agent for assignment.

“By working with the ARA, the industry’s leading voice for establishing universally accepted compliance standards, RDN customers gain peace of mind.” said Justin Zane, president of RDN and Clearplan.

“The new ARA Compliance System will provide all industry stakeholders a comprehensive, verified one-stop solution for compliance management that operates in real-time,” Zane continued in a news release. “This is a big step forward for our industry, and we believe it will deliver great value to all current and future customers.”

Any finance company or agent who assigns or accepts assignments through RDN can take advantage of the transparency offered by the new compliance status feature. To access the benefits of this new compliance tool, finance companies and agents can simply enroll in the ARA Compliance program.

When logging a new case in RDN, color codes under an additional “ARA” column indicate whether an agent is ARA Standards Compliant: red for non-compliant or incomplete, green for compliant, and yellow for pending status. Lenders can quickly filter agents based on current compliance status.

An “ARA Compliant Agent(s)” filter option is also available for agency management.

“ARA is uniquely positioned to lead and manage the oversight of these compliance initiatives for the benefit and mutual success of all stakeholders in the recovery space,” ARA president Dave Kennedy said.

“Together with RDN, we will strive to protect and serve the interests of lenders, forwarders and the repossession community while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness for how compliance is engaged and verified,” Kennedy went on to say.

For more than 10 years, RDN’s software-as-a-service technology has been designed to deliver improved recovery performance and increased operational efficiency while providing full security and transparency.

Similarly, Clearplan’s digital platform can provide recovery agents, drivers, forwarders and automotive lenders a centralized, mobile, cloud-based hub for repossession workflow and logistics management.

Together, Clearplan and RDN, both business units of KAR Global, can connect thousands of recovery agents and automotive finance companies to a streamlined vehicle recovery process — with reduced redundancies and increased actionable data. For more information, visit this website.

Members of ARA, the world’s largest association of recovery and remarketing professionals, specialize in locating and repossessing collateral on behalf of lending institutions such as banks, savings institutions, finance companies, credit unions, rental/leasing companies, and auto, truck and equipment dealers. The nonprofit organization’s members serve 27,000 national and international cities. All members are certified independent business operators. For more information, www.repo.org.

One of the most frustrating places where a finance company’s collateral can be during the repossession and recovery processes is the equivalent of “car jail.”

To help mitigate risk and reduce that frustration, skip-trace and repossession management firm ALS Resolvion recently released a new impound management service called Impound Pro. 

The “end-to-end” service is designed to address the major pain points in the current process of handling vehicles that have been impounded. The firm explained these pain points can include operational inefficiencies, excessive expense, exposure to lien loss and issues remarketing the vehicle.

Impound Pro includes several service components such as VIN monitoring, impound yard negotiation, legal services support, value assessment support, speedy recovery, remarketing for total loss and end of life vehicles, and insurance claim services. 

Most of these components are provided inhouse by ALS Resolvion, but certain services are delivered seamlessly through key partnerships the firm has developed.

The company highlighted the service is available on an “ala carte” basis, giving finance companies the ability to pick and choose certain components or utilize the service as an end-to-end solution.

“The impound management process is difficult for most lenders,” ALS Resolvion chief executive officer Michael Levison said in a news release. “There are multiple steps involved and typically several different service providers must be used.

“Impound Pro is designed to streamline the process and reduce the number of touch points in the process and, by doing so, improving efficiency and results,” Levison continued.

For more information about ALS Resolvion’s Impound Pro service, contact Jose Mendiola at jose.mendiola@alsresolvion.com or call (954) 931-2848.