Whether an outstanding debt is paid can be influenced with a contact strategy and ease of payment, explains Conrad Doornheim, Senior Data Intelligence Consultant at Vesting Finance. By adding email as a channel and smartly optimizing its sending, this financial servicing provider realized a huge increase in online payments.
Solutions & results
20% increase in number of online payments
Increased ease of payment
Increased postage costs
Continuous flow of communication
Ease in ease of payment makes a big difference
Vesting Finance provides finance as a service to a variety of businesses. From reviewing and accepting loans and mortgages on behalf of financial service providers, to credit management for energy companies and telecom providers with many thousands of customers, among others. Collection management and debt monitoring is a big part of this: encouraging people to pay in order to avoid having to call in the bailiff in the end. "Because that doesn't make anyone happy," Doornheim explains. "We therefore focus on financial vitality, for consumers and organizations. Reducing arrears can also be done earlier, by properly assessing loan applications in advance, which allows you to prevent fraud and better assess the creditworthiness of the customer."
The department Doornheim works for approaches people through payment campaigns, for example around vacation pay or a thirteenth month. What matters is whether people can pay and whether they want to, Doornheim says. To find out, personal contact is crucial. "In this industry, e-mail is not a given. The underlying processes are subject to strict regulations. Above all, you have to ensure privacy and prevent data breaches." Calling and sending letters according to a set process was therefore also the standard at Vesting Finance until July 2018. However, that manual work was costing a lot of money and there were few opportunities to efficiently execute payment campaigns.
In May 2018, Vesting Finance therefore started an automation project to include email as a channel in its contact strategy. The business drivers for the project were: increasing payment convenience, reducing postage costs and being able to better measure campaigns with email.
Continuous flow of communication
Vesting Finance was looking for a marketing automation tool that was easy to link to its existing data warehouse without having to free up a lot of IT capacity internally. Doornheim used to work with people from Ternair, so an initial pilot was quickly launched. In addition to the usual letter, the pilot included an e-mail with a payment link from payment provider AcceptEasy. "With that, the payment arrives correctly immediately, which saves another administrative check. After an initial pilot, we had immediately demonstrated that e-mail is a good medium to work with," Doornheim says.
"By adding e-mail as a channel and cleverly optimizing its sending, we realized a huge increase in online payments."
Gredually, e-mail was used in more processes and linked to data analytics, until a continuous flow of communication via e-mail became possible. "Ternair realized for us a fast and flexible unlocking of the e-mail channel in our processes. Things like the time of sending and the amount in the payment link we could then improve ourselves with A/B testing." To do this, Vesting Finance uses its own prediction models and feeds them into the email interactions.
