Founded in 2006, NeuAnalytics has evolved from a consulting company into a highly regarded business intelligence and data logistics provider with robust solutions spanning receivables and compliance management for leading creditors nationwide.
Before the birth of NeuAnalytics, we began as a consulting group asking industry contacts and old clients some simple questions about what it was that they were struggling with when it came to debt management:
- What do they wish they had?
- What are they doing from a strategic standpoint?
- What concerns and risks were they trying to care for?
Finding A Neu Way of Looking at Creditor Data
What We Learned
Through these early years we learned that many creditors were looking for a way to consolidate data and monthly reporting to understand their vendors performance and compliance posture holistically across the entire credit lifecycle. They were struggling with antiquated technology, data silos, and lack of a cohesive and cross-functional/cross-departmental data-sharing strategy.
Specific pain points were:
- Their current collections system had limited reporting capabilities.
- Their system lacked automation, workflows and integration options
- The system capabilities were out of date.
- They did not have a robust compliance management system.
- They were getting fined for noncompliance.
Multiple Solutions Brought a New Set of Problems
Many clients had a dozen or more different solutions providers working on different aspects of their debt portfolios. Those solutions providers often delivered as advertised but the multitude of solutions fragmented the approach to collections management, made it difficult to manage—and were no help in the compliance and regulatory realm.
So, to solve the data fragmentation issue, we began by creating a scorecard using an Excel spreadsheet. Spreadsheets tend to not be as exhaustive and deep, but they allowed us to capture and analyze base data, and we used them as our foundation for automating scorecards.
Then we hired developers to build out reporting functionality around the data we had started to collect. We ended up with a lot more data than we had anticipated but saw this as an opportunity to build out additional features in the areas of performance and compliance management - the basis of NeuAnalytics as it is today.
Data Logistics Is the Core Element
A core part of performance management is data logistics: the aggregation, analyzing, and managing of all of this data, independent of source, for the benefit of creditors. NeuAnalytics works to sanitize and normalize data; simply put – NeuAnalytics’ current approach ensures a high degree of data quality while ensuring an accurate apples-to-apples comparison between various data points.
We use a combination of automated data mining and expert review to inspect the collected data at a very granular level. Having this level of detail on the data instead of just a summary Microsoft Excel spreadsheet--and actually obtaining this information at the account level--increased our system's ability to get the right data to the right person at the right time and increase integrity and transparency in the process.
Building and Enhancing Work Standards
Immediately following the data refinement process, we use that data to construct work standards. Looking at performance results from a summary or aggregate standpoint is helpful in detecting trends and abnormalities, but also having that same data available at an account-level to figure out where vendors are actually being held accountable for the contractual terms they agreed to is a key performance indicator in vendor management.
As a result, we were able to sign up more clients and expand the service to include work-standard audits.
Beyond Auditing to KPIs and How to Tweak the Data
Our clients then asked, “How do I use all this information and all these performance metrics (KPIs) in determining who I should be doing more business with, who I should be doing less business with, who I should be coaching, and how I should be coaching them?”
The best thing about accurate, reliable data is that it provides the solid ingredients for customized reporting. Those reports, in turn, can be visualized on dashboards with trend lines and warning triggers that take the reports well beyond “nice to have” to sending alerts and keeping honest people honest.
That all came out of just the initial five reports we started with. Now, we have closer to 100 reports that are able to slice and dice your vendors performance and compliance data and provide more precise ways to tweak and adjust your collections strategy or come up with a new one to implement.
Our clients also began reaching out for solutions around better inventory management to operationalize the insights they were gaining from the data. We began creating modules and capabilities to do just that.
Below is a brief rundown of our best-in-class solution packages, which collectively run on our Integrated Support Platform (ISP) :
Enterprise Receivables Management —This solution provides debt collection professionals with tools to manage vendors resulting in improved performance, higher liquidation and better collection results.
Business Process Management — This solution indexes the collection process at the task level. It tracks estimates, hours spent, and individual performance metrics with visual reports for everyone in the organization to collaborate productively.
Fraud, Dispute, and Complaint Support — This centralized solution automates critical steps in resolving disputes and complaints and replaces archaic shotgun (and ad hoc) ways to manage those critical functions.
Compliance Management— This solution assists with manual and automated audits for every account, every day. Compliance issues are discussed in more detail below, and this platform aligns collection activities with the most current regulations.
This brings us to the next milestone in the growth of NeuAnalytics over the past 15 years...
Creating Neu Scalable Solutions for the Financial Compliance & Regulatory Space
Several of the capabilities we hadn’t surfaced yet were prompted by the 2008 financial crisis and government response, which, among other things, led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The CFPB is an independent financial regulator. It oversees consumer finance markets, credit cards, student loans, payday loans, and mortgages. This agency supervises and regulates financial companies, writes rules, and enforces consumer protection laws via fines and other means.
Specifically, the CFPB enforces the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), which prohibits unethical practices by collection agencies. Those practices include engaging in unfair, deceptive, or abusive ways to recover consumer debts. The law does not apply to business debts or to original lenders unless the central part of the lender’s primary business is debt connection.
CFPB’s charter includes:
- Enforcing those federal laws against discrimination in consumer finance
- Tracking financial markets to be on the lookout for new threats and risks to consumers
- Researching and evaluating consumer experience in using financial products
- Responding to consumer complaints
- Mentoring and enhancing education in the financial field
NeuAnalytics Was There at the Beginning
Following the birth of the CFPB, NeuAnalytics was brought in by the CFPB because of our expertise and reputation in consumer protection. This newfound relationship allowed us to work alongside the CFPB very early on to educate one another on the market space. Our approach has never been adversarial. Like the CFPB, our goal is to keep our clients within the parameters of what collection agencies and their third-party agents must and can do.
Our valuable interactions with the CFPB led to conversations with some of the largest banks in the United States, who we’ve worked with to build compliance management and operational systems. Those systems provide insight around risks that the CFPB wants to mitigate, as well as to help their institutions pass state and federal audits.
NeuAnalytics Grew Along With the CFPB
As the CFPB has grown, so has NeuAnalytics. Both operate every day to ensure compliance with the overall credit systems. That includes oversight, ensuring that consumers are protected and that creditors are conducting business in compliance with consumer protection laws. As a result, NeuAnalytics has continued to grow and expand while fine-tuning the existing products based on market needs and client feedback.
A Neu Path Ahead for the Compliance & Regulatory Space
Any company operating in this space is at the crossroads of all of the consumer protection regulatory changes coming down from various state, federal, and increasingly, local agencies. One example was the May 2021 Centers for Disease Control moratorium on evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent during the COVID pandemic.
Currently, state-level consumer protection is moving at a more rapid pace than the CFPB. With 50 states, there are a plethora of moving pieces and specificities which must be managed. For example:
- California’s debt collection law protects consumers from “abusive, unfair, or deceptive debt collection practices, including harassment and call restrictions.
- Texas law has a list of what debt collectors cannot do, such as threatening violence, threatening to arrest the consumer, using the telephone to harass debtors with anonymous calls, or making collect telephone calls before disclosing the true name of the caller before the debtor accepts the charges.
- New York consumer protection includes a list of creditors’ rights, including providing the consumer with a list of collection activities prohibited by the CFPB.
- Colorado has also enacted various laws that protect consumers from abusive and deceptive debt collection tactics. The Colorado Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (CFDCPA) provides consumers with specific rights and restricts the practices that debt collectors and collection agencies may use to attempt to collect debts.
So, here at NeuAnalytics, we are adjusting and shifting our business model in tandem with these regulatory changes to ensure we can meet the requirements of creditors, consumers, and the CFPB for years to come.
What’s Happening Now at NeuAnalytics
At NeuAnalytics, our current focus is on driving performance and compliance simultaneously. We do that by fine-tuning credit lifecycle management on both standard flows and more intricate flows such as fraud, disputes and complaints.
The compliance and regulatory spaces must have trusted players like NeuAnalytics. Our job is to securely monitor, report, and react to the influx of changes. We can leverage that stewardship to deliver insights to creditors at the summary, as well as the account and activity level. The creditors can translate those insights into better strategies for managing their vendors while staying in bounds in the complicated field of compliance regulations and protecting the consumer.
What’s Ahead for NeuAnalytics
Looking back on 15 years, we wanted some insight into where NeuAnalytics could be in 10 years. We asked CEO Ryan Neuweg, and this is what he had to say:
“We definitely want to be the industry standard, right? We want to be the go-to platform when people think, ‘How do you solve that problem?’ Who do you want to solve that problem with? We want you to think of our people.”
Ryan continued: “(Business magnate and investor guru Warren) Buffett said, “It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. And I follow that. I think that's exactly what NeuAnalytics does. We're not doing any one thing that's putting people on the Moon or anything. But we do a lot of ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
Let’s Recap
The last 15 years have seen NeuAnalytics evolve into an enormously valuable resource for creditors who want to stay effective, efficient, and compliant. At the outset of our evolution from a business intelligence resource for creditors to our present state, we have always focused on solving our clients’ needs.
We learned that the technology our clients were using was creating data silos that led to blind spots especially in the compliance and regulatory space. We attacked this data fragmentation issue by creating scorecard metrics and developing the initial spreadsheet approach into the foundation for automated scorecards and robust reporting
We sanitized, standardized, and scrubbed the data and connected the data points. Then we developed work standards based on performance measurements that hold vendors accountable.
The next step was to show how our clients can use all that data through reports that make sense of it and show it in a digestible and actionable way. We developed three solutions to manage default receivables, monitor business processes, and handle compliance issues.
Finally, our flagship achievement is our scalable, integrated support platform (ISP) that enables our clients to effectively manage their third-party vendors and associated work and performance standards. We are pioneers in the space and have a historical partnership with CFPB, whose charter is all about consumer protection against unfair debt collection. We have grown along with the CFPB.
The road ahead will be substantially influenced by the ebb and flow of consumer protection changes at the federal and state levels and the mid- to long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic repercussions We’re adjusting and enhancing our solutions to ensure that your organization is future proofed, not matter the change.
Providing the Tools You Need for Compliance, Regulatory, and Workflow Management
We have best-in-class solutions backed by the industry's foremost domain experts with years of experience helping leading creditors devise more effective performance strategies and better manage compliance and regulatory expectations, and we’re ready to help you. Contact us today to find out what NeuAnalytics can do for you.
