FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Cape Town, June 24 2013 – Two pioneering companies in the payments and collections field have joined forces to help tackle South Africa’s consumer debt problem.
EMP (Emerging Market Payments) has partnered with Katabat to help companies manage customers in arrears and enable individuals to take control of their repayments schedules leading to improved collections rates.
As consumer debt in South Africa continues to rise, many companies are also being affected as customers fail to settle their bills and ignore repeated requests to pay. According to South Africa’s National Credit Regulator which is trying to curb unsecured lending levels, nearly half of all consumers are at least three months behind on debt payments.
Many organisations in South Africa which extend credit, including banks, retailers, personal loan companies, local government and utilities, are using outdated legacy collections systems to manage outstanding customer debt.
EMP and Katabat will now be providing these types of organisations with the most advanced arrears management and collections technology available today which will deliver a huge improvement in collection rates while improving the customer experience.
Katabat’s cloud-based enterprise collections solution consolidates all credit-related communications, including phone calls, web visits, emails, texts, and letters between an organisation and its customers into a single dialogue. This enables organisations to adopt a far more targeted, personalised, and responsive approach to engaging with customers who are in arrears.
Katabat’s FlexCollect includes a self-service system which enables people in arrears to manage their own repayments schedule online. Removing the need to contact a call centre improves response rates, allows customers to manage their affairs in a less stressful way – all the while reducing the costs of running a call centre.
Mike Crawley, CEO at EMP Southern Africa, says “Rising debt levels in South Africa are affecting the viability of many businesses which must explore every technique available to recoup payments. Enabling customers to self-cure is a straightforward and proven way to improve collections rates. Katabat’s FlexCollect brings best-of-breed and proven technology to Africa’s lenders.”
Katabat’s FlexCollect will be hosted by EMP and tightly integrated with its account processing platform, although it will be available to lenders who are not processed on the EMP platform.
Vytas Kisielius, CEO of Katabat, said: “People feel more in control if they are able to set up and manage their own repayments schedule online whenever is convenient for them, or to speak with an agent if they so choose and get identical payment program options. This empowerment improves collections rates across all sectors. Clearly there is an extremely worrying debt problem in South Africa and we are able to help companies whose businesses are being affected.”
About EMP
Emerging Markets Payments (EMP) is the leading electronic payments processing company in the Middle East and Africa (MEA). EMP covers all elements of the payments value chain, from issuing, acquiring and switching through to card procurement and personalisation. It also covers all the major channels, being card, mobile and Internet. EMP is currently partner to over 130 banks and 30,000 retailers across 45 countries in MEA. The company also offers a full range of eGovernment solutions. EMP offices are located in Cairo, Egypt; Amman, Jordan; Nairobi, Kenya; Lagos, Nigeria; Cape Town, South Africa. For more information, please visit: www.emp-group.com.
About Katabat
Katabat offers pioneering customer experience management solutions that enable lenders to deploy completely synchronized offers, contacts, workflows, content and treatments across credit card, real estate, student, and instalment loan products. The company’s CredAgilityä platform is helping a rapidly growing number of top lenders automate business processes, optimize the effectiveness of their resolution strategies, and realize efficiency gains and improved customer engagement. The company’s flagship FlexCollect® solution, for example, is helping creditors improve their borrowers’ experience while posting large efficiency and effectiveness gains while dramatically improving compliance. For more information, visit katabat.com or call 302-830-9262.
For more information please visit www.emp-group.com and katabat.com or contact Katabat’s PR representative Bridget Fishleigh – bridget@telecomsprafrica.com, +44 7946 342 903 or skype: bridgetfishleigh
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Katabat is the leading provider of debt collections software to banks, agencies, and alternative lenders. Founded in 2006 and led by a diverse team of lending executives and leading software engineers, Katabat pioneered digital collections and has led the industry ever since. It is our mission to provide the best credit collections software in the market and solve debt resolution from the perspectives of both lenders and borrowers.
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