Reducing loan delinquency with better collections
St. Charles, Missouri, US
At a Glance
• Temenos customer for 17 years.
• Collections platform works across entire operation
• 360 degree overview of borrowers
• Faster reporting, close to real-time insights
• Delinquency rate running below average
Vantage Credit Union is headquartered in St. Charles, Missouri. It began as a credit union for teachers and the broader education sector, but has since expanded its base to all residents of the Greater St. Louis area. Today it has almost 70,000 members, and offers a full suite of financial services, including banking, credit, investments and insurance. Vantage has enjoyed excellent growth in recent years. Revenues in 2023 were up to $67.3m from $50.5m in 2021. It has almost $1.2bn in assets.
Community First
For Matt Stegall, Vantage’s Assistant Vice President of Credit Resolution and Recovery, this growth has been the result of “strengthening community ties by delivering convenient, confident, and personalized services to our members.” But that job is becoming harder, he says. “There’s a wider variety of competition in the marketplace now, from neobanks, fintechs, and big banks. Add to that a more proactive regulatory environment and the evolving threats of fraud and cybersecurity, and we’re constantly having to find the right balance between innovating our product portfolio while managing compliance and risk.”
He explains that it’s about looking at their technology stack to ensure it continues to serve members and staff.
We always strive to meet our members where they want to do business in a way that is convenient and safe for them and improves the productivity of our employees.”
Matt Stegall, Assistant Vice President of Credit Resolution and Recovery at Vantage Credit Union
Collections are a large part of that strategy. The value of Vantage’s loan book has increased by 23% to $812.2m from 2021-2023 and represents a significant portion of the overall business.
Recovering outstanding loans is both a commercial necessity, but also a brand play, explains Matt. “We need to engage with borrowers effectively, and in a manner that is in keeping with our community approach.”
Central to the stack
Since 2007, Vantage has entrusted this challenge to Temenos. Its Collections platform has become a critical part of the credit union’s stack. “It’s really become the one-stop repository for all our collection activity,” says Matt. “We use it to organize our standard collections work – setting our collectors’ daily work queues, giving them the information they need on each case, and for analysis. We also use it for special collections tasks like repossessions, bankruptcies, foreclosures, and deceased.”
Accelerating analysis
The reporting capability of the platform, which includes standard reports and ad-hoc analysis, has been very valuable, Matt says. “It’s super important to me. I don’t have to put in a ticket request to build a report, and then wait for it. I can just select datasets and compile reports myself. So I can produce and share insights more regularly, which means my managers are more informed too.”
This has enabled Matt to keep track of the performance of individual collectors, and the rate of collections by stage. “It means that, on any given day of the month, I can see exactly where we stand and what we need to do to achieve our targets. That translates into a lot of success by the end of the month.” This is evidenced by the data. Since using Collections, the credit union’s delinquency rate is running at below peer average.
Clear and connected
This ease of use features across the platform, explains Matt.
All the data is set up in a Windows format, where it’s easy for the end user to grab information, review accounts, and see a 360 degree overview of each member. They can also configure letters and emails without having to ask for help. That’s a big time-saving.”
Matt Stegall, Assistant Vice President of Credit Resolution and Recovery at Vantage Credit Union
Adding new capabilities is equally efficient. “The platform’s APIs provide connections to lots of services. It’s just a case of letting Temenos know what we want and then activating the connector. We’ve recently done that to start a new outsource collection operation and it was so quick and easy.”
Cloud future
Vantage has run Collection on-premises, but is now looking at migrating to cloud. “We’re doing the same for some of our other core systems. Knowing that we can easily ‘lift and shift’ the platform to cloud, without any major re-architecturing or coding, is a big plus.” The move will benefit the credit union’s regulatory obligations, says Matt.
Cloud will give us 24 hour support, with somebody else
Matt Stegall, Assistant Vice President of Credit Resolution and Recovery at Vantage Credit Union
monitoring the system.” Version updates will be another area that they can offload. “That all frees up resources that we can redeploy.”
In safe hands
Matt and his team are confident in the cloud support they can expect from Temenos, because they have experienced it during upgrades. The latest of those – to version 23 – took place at the end of 2023. “The upgrade was very organized. I appreciated the project structure and the test scripts that are provided…because as we all know, we can’t think of everything all the time. It’s good to have somebody guide you that’s been through the process numerous times, and who stays with you for the duration of the upgrade.”
This support helped them approach the upgrade more effectively than ever, says Matt. “Temenos advised us to appoint a dedicated member of staff to lead on the project, test as much as possible – two to three times a week – and perform mock upgrades.”
It echoes his experience with ongoing technical support.
We rarely have any issues with the platform – it’s so robust – but when we do have to raise a ticket, we get a response and resolution really quickly.”
Matt Stegall, Assistant Vice President of Credit Resolution and Recovery at Vantage Credit Union
Matt says that they have come to view Temenos as an extension of the credit union. “Our aim is to make the lives of our members and our employees easier. And that’s what Temenos does for us.”