Ask a group of people to sum something up in one word and it paints an interesting picture. The words used by a handful of professionals from across the credit and collection industry to describe 2024 paint a picture of hope, of optimism, of an excitement for what the future is going to bring. Check out what has these executives so stoked about what happened in 2024 and what it will mean in 2025.
Brandy Rousselle, Capital Recovery
If I had to pick one word to describe this year professionally, it would be progress.
This year has been all about expanding in meaningful, intentional ways. We’ve scaled our operations strategically by broadening our services and strategies with existing services. We’ve successfully achieved SOC 2 compliance by completing a rigorous third-party audit, demonstrating our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of data security, privacy, and operational integrity.
We’re building partnerships with industry leading vendors to manage higher volume accounts, maintaining minimum expense. At the same time, we’ve worked hard to stay ahead of the curve by initiating the integration of AI bots and refining internal processes to ensure compliance with evolving regulations to allow us to achieve higher levels of growth in 2025.
For me, this year has been about more than just reaching goals. It’s been about learning new things, adapting, and building a foundation for even bigger things ahead. That’s why “progress” feels like the perfect way to sum it all up.
Gordon Beck, Valor Intelligent Processing
My one word to describe 2024 is PIVOT. I never thought I would ever say this, but human capital, especially US-based brick and mortar agents, are proving to become a secondary recovery source to digital self-service collections. With all of the scam calls out there, consumers are answering the phones less often and with the familiarity and confidence in online digital payment platforms, customers are choosing to pay their bills without speaking to agents at all. The strategies of motivation and team work are still critical and people will always be the foundation of our industry, but the need to PIVOT to a more robust and elegant digital collections strategy has been at the forefront of my business this past year. As I have always said, our industry is full of great professionals, chameleons that can adapt and change to the environment we face and that has never been more true than what my team faced in 2024.
Ken Rubin, Hollis Cobb Associates & Connect International
2024 can be summed by with the phrase “Recruit, Train, Repeat”. Many people know I hold two C-level positions: the CFO of Hollis Cobb Associates, LLC and the Managing Partner of Connect International, LLC. Between both organizations we have increased our sustained headcount by 250 agents during 2024. None of this could have been possible without a stellar training program with the best leaders in that area. My organizations works on projects well beyond collections such as insurance follow-up, patient access tracks as well as customer service (for various industries.) The number of training tracks we had to manage this past year, taking into account client specific training, runs into literally dozens of permutations. The company with the best training will win every time. Our training department demonstrates that every day.
None of this is possible without solid, creative recruiting. It feels like we have been through 10 different employment markets in the last five years, and we have learned a lot along the way, including the use of informed risk-taking to determine what works and what doesn’t work. Planning, creativity and leadership in this area, whether in the States or Nicaragua or Panama has made every bit of difference to allow us to meet our staffing goals (and a lot of late nights by the most dedicated teams I know.)
We hope 2025 will be more of the same. Recruit, Train, Repeat.
Mindy Chumbley, Solverity
The word that defined 2024 for me is opportunity
