Joe Gambler
One thing that annoys me is that the legal attitude to debt is so biased in favour of the borrower, who the law treats as cretins incapable of making decisions for themselves. It is pleasing to see a minor shift mooted in new legislation to shift more responsibility to the borrower. The relevant words in that link being,
“Borrowers would also be made more accountable for providing accurate information to lenders under the new laws, which will come into effect in March if they pass Parliament, and will replace the current practice of 'lender beware' with a 'borrower responsibility' principle.”I did not know that debtors disputing a debt assigned to a debt buyer could not appear before AFCA. Because the only sensible way to resolve disputes is to record the facts and opinions in writing, I doubt if physically appearing before AFCA is going to make a statistically relevant difference. I refer to the words, “
The Government will also move to change its credit regulations, allowing Australians involved in disputes with debt collectors to appear before the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, an independent dispute resolution body.” There would be a need to handle EDR cost recovery from frivolous complainants, and from credit repairers/debt mediators elevating IDT complaints without basis to EDR to generate fees. Credit repair agencies are the real villains in this field.
Anyhow, if these regulations come into effect, it will, on balance, benefit CCP, and disadvantage the hundreds of small debt collectors in Australia (many are one-person operators, or operate with the assistance of very few). Regulation imposed by the debt sellers would be more relevant to CCP, and they would include whatever statutory regulations apply.
https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Research into the Australian debt collection industry_0.pdf states,
“The debt collection industry in Australia is relatively competitive, with over 500 businesses offering some form of debt collection service. While the industry is dominated by a few larger players, the sector is mainly comprised of small businesses, with 63% generating less than $200,000 in revenue and 95% employing less than twenty people.” The number of PDL buyers, as opposed to agency collectors, would be much smaller, but I doubt if CCP buys more than 25% of Australian PDLs, but I do not know. Suffice to say that it is a small percentage of debt collected, and a larger percentage of PDLs collected on. Regulation and client preference favours large operations like CCP.
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