Top Retail Bank Achieves Best-In-Class Compliance and Customer Experience

The client is a top U.S. financial services company with an annual revenue of $88 billion, serving over 70 million customers. The company employs more than 250,000 team members across 80+ businesses. As a major player in the financial sector, the client faces significant regulatory and competitive pressures, particularly in the area of debt collections. The company must navigate complex regulations enforced by bodies such as the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). These regulations require meticulous handling of customer interactions, especially when customers notify the bank of financial hardship. The client sought to improve compliance and customer experience while reducing the risk of legal actions and financial penalties.

As is the case for many financial institutions, collections represent an important part of this top retail bank’s business. Lenders need customers to repay their outstanding debts, and contacting them via telephone, repeatedly if necessary, is standard procedure. There are, however, restrictions surrounding the debt collection process. If a customer verbally notifies a bank of financial hardship, the bank must immediately cease its collection efforts, including phone calls. These restrictions are enforced by three principal regulatory bodies and pieces of legislation – the Telecommunications Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – which require banks to sort through their customer calls and address non-compliant behavior. Manually reviewing calls for financial hardship references, and tracking these customers before they are dialed again – which often happens as soon as the next day – takes significant resources and effort and frequently results in error, the consequences of which can be severe. Customers have the right to bring legal action against a bank if the collection calls don’t stop after they give notification of hardship. With no easy way of either affirming or refuting a claim, it’s often easier for a bank to settle rather than fight. In the previous year alone, banking institutions paid out tens of millions of dollars in non-compliance settlements. Furthermore, complaints lodged against banks by consumers have been made public on the OCC website, increasing the transparency of a company’s misjudgment and negatively impacting its reputation as well as increasing regulatory scrutiny. Like most financial services companies today, our client was struggling to successfully navigate its industry’s challenging regulatory and competitive climate. It looked to its existing call recording and coaching service partner, Mattersight, for a way forward.

To help this client achieve its goal of maintaining compliance, avoiding legal battles, and improving the customer experience, Mattersight deployed an automated and reliable technology grounded in high-quality voice and desktop analytics to hundreds of collections agents across multiple sites. Fueled by a state-of-the-art linguistic algorithm, Mattersight Voice Analytics identifies the specific keywords that may result in compliance violations. When one of these keywords is detected in the conversation, Mattersight Desktop Analytics monitors the agent’s response, capturing when incorrect data is selected or entered. The system then notifies the bank’s auditors of the incident within an average of 45 minutes. This turn-around time greatly reduces the risk of an agent calling a customer the following day and violating the regulations in place. Mattersight’s solution has also improved this client’s auditing expenses by 11% per hour, largely due to auditors no longer having to listen to a sample of phone calls and potentially missing violations. And because 100% of all collections calls are recorded and automatically audited, the client has evidence to easily counter false non-compliance lawsuits, saving significant legal expenditures.

• The bank reduced their previous noncompliance rate by 80%, helping them to achieve an astonishing 96% compliance.
• The client now has the tools in place to flag, capture, and correct the 4% of calls that do contain troubling language, preventing violations from occurring.
• Mattersight’s solution has also improved this client’s auditing expenses by 11% per hour, largely due to auditors no longer having to listen to a sample of phone calls and potentially missing violations.
• Because 100% of all collections calls are recorded and automatically audited, the client has evidence to easily counter false non-compliance lawsuits, saving significant legal expenditures.
• The client’s continued application of Mattersight Voice and Desktop Analytics has helped them to achieve best-in-class compliance, recognized and applauded by regulatory bodies.

• 96% compliance rate achieved.
• 80% reduction in non-compliance.
• 11% lift in $ collected per hour.