Loss of Shareholder Value, page-16

@HungryHawk I agree with you - debt collection agencies are part of the investing landscape and also an integral part of the business world. The larger ones are very much working within the public eye and have been regulated more heavily in recent times to cease the reliance of court actions, bankruptcies and asset seizures to force the repayment of monies owed. Despite the introduction of computer modelling within the industry I can only imagine that it has much more to do with coming to a figure which they will pay for a particular type of PDF and its future discounted value than how the debt is collected. IMO there are only four types of debtors. 1. those willing and able to pay - these generally pay their debts to the originator on time. 2. Those unwilling and able to pay - these make up a proportion of PDF purchases and often are debtors who play a game of seeing if they can get away without paying at all or are prioritising payment to habits of personal choice. 3. Those who are willing but unable to pay - these make up a fair proportion of PDF purchases and these are debtors who have been subject to ill health, job retrenchment, accident or often a variety of family problems. 4. Those unwilling and unable to pay. - these are the types of debt that the larger PDF companies avoid. In my day the methodology was :- 1. they paid when contacted and reminded of their obligation. 2. were assessed as best could be ascertained as to their actual ability to repay and advised that their actions created credit impairment and future difficulty in gaining credit before taking legal action as a last resort (now verboten) 3 are usually assisted by offering payment plans with sensible repayments over practical terms or delayed repayment and assisted to restore any credit impairment they may have suffered initially. 4. Usually they are people who have made a firm decision not to pay and have skipped or even changed their name, set at the start to deceive the originator and not pay or some may have suffered circumstances which cause them to change their view about repayment credit and loans and just give up entirely. Occasionally the latter group can be assisted with great care and patience to become willing to pay again but the time and costs are usually to great and such debts eventually end up being written off.

Sorry about the history lesson but I have taken the trouble because not many of the public understand that the PDF industry is now collecting debts which were more often collected in the past by originators like banks and other lenders which have now dispensed with expensive and staff intensive collection departments the actions of which are now so heavily regulated. It is really a case of cause and effect - the lender originators make credit more easily obtainable and the effect is that some other body or business is preferred to clean it up, dissect and digest it and turf out the unobtainable. Not an easy game and one where some claim the morals are not up to scratch - but that is business today.