According to Credit Clear, the pandemic has created a surge in debt and debt-related issues. Financial comparison site Canstar reported figures that show the average Australian owes $3,295 on their credit card plus an additional $21,200 in personal debt (excluding property loans).
Organisations, governments, and energy regulators have put a pause on overdue payments due to the financial disruption the pandemic has caused.
Money collected through traditional means is also stressful. Credit Clear eliminates that stress and creates a better user experience by offering customers a digital route to give them power to pay as they go.
"It's less threatening. Customers prefer to engage on their bills in a digital way, rather than receiving mountains of paper,” Credit Clear founder and executive director Lewis Romano says.
"All of our clients, typically large enterprises with tens of thousands of customers, want to know how their collections campaign is going, but also that it is being conducted with the financial well-being of their customers in mind. They want to see what the data is telling them about their customers, where the segments are, and where the opportunities are for them to drive campaigns, so they can increase the collection,” Romano adds.
Credit Clear’s early market entry strategy required the acquisition of Credit Solutions, a traditional debt collection agency, in 2019 Credit Clear focused on converting Credit Solutions clients from traditional debt collection to digital debt collection. The acquisition has enabled Credit Clear to gain strong market share in Australia.
However, Credit Clear also inherited challenges such as managing multiple collection systems.
In order to provide basic reporting and analytics to clients, complicated queries were required to stitch multiple sources of data together, across digital and traditional workflows.
Credit Clear needed to unify data in one location in order to simplify analytics and reporting, so they turned to Sisense in June this year.
Credit Clear chief product and technology officer Jason Serafino says since implementing Sisense, Credit Clear has increased the speed and accuracy of accessing data internally to ensure that everyone's "drinking from the same well."
"The flexibility in integrating Sisense fast-tracked implementation for Credit Clear. We wanted an analytics platform that could be easily integrated into our digital platform. Sisense gave us multiple options for embedding dashboards into our client reporting portal," Jason says.
Credit Clear also wanted a no-code or low-code solution that freed up Credit Clear's data scientists and engineers to focus on behavioural analytics, making Sisense the best fit and enabling the team to activate their data-driven strategy faster.
"With a couple of training sessions from Sisense, we could enable 10 client-facing staff in our business to do client reporting and analytics, freeing our data scientists to focus on building advanced analytics and machine learning modules,” Jason says.
Sisense regional vice president APAC Eyal Mekler believes a data-driven approach to frictionless debt repayment is an exciting inroad into helping businesses manage receivables.
“The business landscape is becoming more complex for businesses in Australia that are now struggling to recover from the pandemic. We’re excited that Credit Clear is infusing data analytics, through the power of Sisense, to empower businesses to take ownership of their receivables holistically,” Mekler concludes.