Fintech disrupts collections industry with Sisense

35% uplift in collections with deployment of Sisense-powered artificial intelligence

As a hybrid, end-to-end provider of debt collections services, led by award-winning artificial intelligence, Credit Clear has been disrupting the traditional debt collections industry with enhanced collection rates and an improved customer engagement and experience. The company has grown rapidly in the past year, increasing revenue through a string of material new client wins; several of which the company expects to become top-ten clients by revenue, as well as achieving significant growth through existing clients giving the company more business.

With a team of 200 staff, including data scientists and software engineers, the company has set new revenue records each quarter and is currently on a revenue run rate of $37.44 million.

With the Australiasian business posting exceptional growth, Credit Clear has its sights set on exporting its unique digital platform and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to international markets. The company established an international partnership in South Africa with one of the country’s largest debt collectors late last year and has deployed the platform to the new jurisdiction within four months, demonstrating its scalability potential.

Credit Clear, which is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), manages more than 835,000 active customer accounts across a range of industries, including transport, financial services, insurance, government, and utilities. In just over a handful of years, the company has made incredible strides in the debt-collection space. A true pioneer, Credit Clear is setting an industry benchmark by demonstrating how critical a data-driven approach is to succeed in a competitive and increasingly uncertain landscape.

Unify fragmented data ecosystem

Coming out of a global pandemic that created a surge in debt and debt-related issues and at a time when organisations must continue their digital acceleration to remain relevant and competitive, differentiating its product in the market has become a big driver for Credit Clear. On top of this, Credit Clear has more data than ever before.

Large enterprise clients wanted to know how collections campaigns were going. They wanted to see what the data could tell them about their customers, where the segments were, and where the opportunities to drive new campaigns existed, so they could increase collection. And Credit Clear had the vision to improve collection outcomes for clients by creating a less-threatening, pay-as-you-go digital experience for its tens of thousands of customers.

The company also wanted to understand how it could sell, or monetise, insights and analyse an increasing amount of data and share that to make faster, more accurate decisions at scale. Where it got complicated was in the process of turning data into information, information into insights, and insights into action. The challenge was managing multiple collection systems.

To improve its offering and empower businesses to take ownership of their receivables more holistically, Credit Clear wanted to unify its fragmented data ecosystem. With a fragmented data ecosystem, which came as a result of its acquisition of traditional debt-collection agencies, Credit Clear needed to unify its data to one location to simplify analytics and reporting, says Jason Serafino, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Credit Clear.

“Stitching multiple sources of data together across digital and traditional workflows couldn’t be standard practice going forward,” he says. “For Credit Clear to scale and remain competitive in an increasingly complex business landscape, it needed data analytics to unify its data ecosystem.”

Delivery of no/low-code solution

Credit Clear selected Sisense Fusion™ Embed to simplify analytics and reporting. Sisense unifies and centralises data in one location, increasing speed of access and data accuracy.

“We wanted an analytics platform that could easily integrate into our digital platform. We’re able to integrate Sisense within the entire delivery of what we’re doing. Sisense gave us multiple options for embedding dashboards into our client reporting portal,” Serafino says. “The relationship is between our core platform and AI, and we use Sisense to present results, engage with clients, and get their feedback.”

Sisense’s no-code/low-code solution was the best fit. With a couple of training sessions from Sisense, client-facing staff were able to perform client reporting and analytics. The aim was to ensure that everyone was “drinking from the same well.”

Even more, using Sisense frees up Credit Clear’s data scientists and engineers to focus on high-value initiatives like building advanced analytics and machine learning modules to activate its data-driven strategy faster.

By equipping staff on how to use the platform, Credit Clear gave them the ability to answer any client queries and explore client data to provide further insights at scale. It “slices and dices” through the data to understand what’s going on at each level. Those insights go into its AI models to generate better results that are then replayed via Sisense to clients.

“Sisense allows us to dig into different customer behaviours to find out what’s driving them. A standard report in Tableau tells one story, but it doesn’t allow you to ask the next question. Whereas, Sisense allows us to build dashboards and capabilities that allow everyone to slice and dice to get an insight,” Serafino says.

This turned into a point of difference as Credit Clear’s clients were able to question the data and get better insights. “Our competitors aren’t doing that,” Serafino points out. “Insights are our competitive advantage.

“Sisense is a data-innovation platform. You can see evolutions that are happening on the platform and track the kind of insights you’re getting and how you’re monetising them. The more our customers engage with our system, the more data they want to share, the more interested they become, and ultimately, the smarter our system becomes, and the more potential we have to evolve our product.”

Building trust with data analytics

Beyond intelligent systems, taking clients on the journey also helps build trust. In the conservative debt-collection space, digital transformation is a major disruption. Credit Clear has been taking great care in building customers’ trust, showing them the results, showing that it’s safe, and building up from there.

“In Australia, when we talk about using AI in debt collection we found that we have to take it one step at a time. Providing insights to our customers is just as important as getting insights from our team.”

By bolstering its services with data analytics, the company has improved its digital customer journey, providing more payment options for customers. Thanks to Sisense and its ability to go beyond reporting, Credit Clear’s customers now have the ability to set up payment plans themselves through pre-approved arrangements with clients; a welcome move as the rising cost of living puts additional strain on financial situations and overdue payments.

Future-proofing the road to success

Credit Clear has run a number of case studies and experiments to ensure it is indeed achieving valuable outcomes. And the proof is in the pudding. Credit Clear took home the award for the “Best use of AI” at the 2021 Australian FinTECH Awards and in a recent case study for a large client, Credit Clear’s AI-driven software, which predicts the next best channel, message and timing to use, has delivered a 35% uplift in collections for a toll road operator.

The case study measured optimised workflows using SMS, email, and dialler calls, using the Credit Clear platform and the same message templates. The differentiator between the two treatments was the use of Credit Clear AI to decide which action to take next for a particular customer, based on what had already happened to date.

“It’s a very exciting period of growth for us,” Serafino says. “We’re a rather unusual fintech as we actually make money, turning operationally profitable in May and June 2022. A large reason why we’re so successful is because of the platform we built. We’ve proven it to be disruptive.”

To stay ahead of the curve, Serafino knows it’s critical to continually evolve. That’s why Credit Clear’s partnership with Sisense is so significant – they scale together. And there’s so much left to come.

“It’s been amazing. We’ve capitalised on different opportunities, we’ve disrupted the market, and I still feel like we’re only barely scratching the surface,” Serafino says.

“What I think is really exciting about our hybrid offering is that our technology now has the opportunity to scale massively. We’re finding the same problems exist globally, be it in South Africa, the US, the UK, or Europe. Businesses need to collect, but the collection world lagged on digital. Now that we have the technology, we can deploy it anywhere. It’s fantastic.”

A key attraction to Sisense was the ability to completely integrate it with our digital platforms. This enabled us to have embedded analytics, which was key.

– Jason Serafino, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Credit Clear