The Client
The client is one of Europe’s largest credit management company operating in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. The client specializes in debt recovery, data analytics and customer insights.
The client is based in Leeds and employs over 2,000 people in a role from collections to compliance, and from legal to learning and development. It is a registered company and most importantly, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
In the Year 2013, it acquired a major consumer debt servicing firm and an award-winning collection agency. In 2019, the client continues in the path of inorganic growth by acquiring other credit/debt servicing business.
The Challenges
The major challenge was synchronizing multiple bespoke solutions and services built on different technologies and enhancements to achieve a fair debt collection process. Moreover, it is found to be essential for a debt recovery company to be fully aware of the applicable laws of country and state acts for a fair debt recovery process. Thus, it was also expected to manage client’s IT applications in compliance with different acts of Fair Debt Collection Practices (GDPR).
The Objective
Post-acquisition of a major debt consumer service firm, the client wanted to run the entire operations from Leeds office & drive down costs of operations near to London. The client was seeking to recruit an IT Services & Solutions Partner carrying the expertise and experience of FI domain, combination of skills to deliver engagements to manage legacy & modernize the entire application & technology suite & to support the acquired debt consumer service firm in a business transition, ‘lift & shift’ and support the entire 250+ IT Applications landscape. The system and applications were to be enhanced and upgraded in order to make the debt collection process:
- More efficient & modernized.
- Comply with the standards.
- Accept legal and ethical practices.
The Solution
The client selected JK Tech as their preferred partner to manage a seamless business transition, implementation, up-gradation & support by driving down the incurred costs and move back to Leeds. With around 250+ desktop and web applications based on .Net and VB6, JK Tech continuous to deliver value in incident management support, which included unplanned interruptions and reductions in quality of IT service and enhancement of these applications.
The current application on the VB6 Legacy application was a hindrance to the business growth as it involved challenges in maintaining and upgrading the system. There were other vulnerabilities like security and integration issues. VB6 legacy application was upgraded to achieve and demonstrate data integrity, simplify their technology infrastructure, making their debt collection process seamless and meeting the stringent compliance regulations of fair debt collection practice. The team also helped them with the integration and support of many third-party financial services.
Business Flow of Debt Collection Process:
JK Tech planned and scheduled the rollout of IT services, updates and release to the production environment thus ensuring that the system and applications are functioning in the desired way as expected after the successful installation, configuration, testing and modification as per requirement.
The other DBA Support project with JK Tech in Progress 4GL delivered value-based services around:
- Efficient extracting, transforming and loading large volume of data.
- Monitoring, handling and maintaining the security of the extensive database to maintain efficiency.
- Creating backups and recovery plans based on industry best practices.
- Storing, retrieving data and planning and monitoring of disk storage management.
- Performing troubleshooting activities when any error occurs in the database server.
The Benefits
- Knowledge Transfer, Transition (Lift & Shift), Support, Enhancements, Modernisation & Digital enablement of the Application Landscape reduced the operational cost by 50%.
- Upgrading legacy technology utilising JK Tech expertise enabled the contemporary enhancement of systems by overcoming the integration, scalability, compatibility and security issues.
- Effective & SLA-driven incident support and new demand development management enabled the business in running seamless business processes without disruption.
- The DBA support delivered value in managing the data integrity, performance monitoring, security, troubleshooting, as well as backup and data recovery using Progress Best Practices.
