Personal debt has grown exponentially all over the world. Especially, in the UK, nearly 9 million people are over-indebted, which can create a debt spiral where households borrow more to service existing debt. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken this situation to the next phase. As a result, it is estimated that nearly 250,000 small businesses might close once COVID-related support programmes end.
Usually, businesses employ debt collection agencies to recover outstanding debts. However, most collections agencies rely on inconvenient and impersonal phone calls and letters to engage with customers, resulting in a bad customer experience and negative publicity for organisations looking for repayment.
Customer-centric debt management platform
This is where London-based Ophelos puts the customer at the heart of the debt collection process, thereby letting them resolve their debts on their own terms. Now, the company is in the headlines as it closed a $2.3 million (nearly £1.6 million) pre-seed investment round co-led by Connect Ventures and Fly Ventures to continue building its customer-centric debt management platform, whilst growing the engineering and customer operations teams.
Rory Stirling, General Partner at Connect Ventures: “Credit is a fundamental and growing part of our consumer economy. Fintech has given us many great innovations, including improved access to credit, but debt management has so far remained largely untouched and unloved. We see a very large opportunity to build superior digital products for consumers to understand and manage their personal debts. And, at the same time, it provides a strong customer-centric approach that enterprises expect to offer in all other parts of their business. Ophelos is the company that is going to make a difference here. It has a brilliant team that is re-thinking debt collection for the 21st Century and I look forward to working with them on this journey.”
Matt Wichrowski, Partner at Fly Ventures: “The debt collection industry is in dire need of a shake-up but until now, we haven’t seen anyone come along with the passion and insight to make a difference until Ophelos. Despite commanding billions of dollars every year this sector has been slow to adopt technology or modern product thinking. We felt that this was a unique opportunity to create a new category of tech-first, transparent and empathetic recovery. The combination of the founding team’s incredible backgrounds and social impact mission will be integral to Ophelos’s success and we are delighted to be backing Amon, Paul and Qingchen as they transform debt management.”
AI-powered debt collection
Ophelos reimagines the debt collection industry to improve financial health for consumers and businesses. It partners with businesses to challenge and transform the $24 billion debt collection industry to help them improve their customer relationships. The company uses AI and behavioural science to optimise and digitise customer communications, offer more affordable debt repayment plans and achieve more accurate vulnerability detection. Eventually, it improves financial health for both consumers and businesses, with customers more likely to engage and businesses more likely to recoup overdue debts.
Customers communicate with the Ophelos team through digital channels, set up flexible and affordable repayment plans through a digital platform, or opt for other solutions such as breathing space. Businesses gain insights gathered through digital affordability assessments and vulnerability detection underpinned by Open Banking to help them better understand the financial health of their customers and benefit from machine learning-driven pattern analysis to detect regulatory and compliance risk, amongst other features.
The resulting debt collection process is accessible, anonymous, and convenient for customers. It offers businesses enhanced recovery rates, intelligent insights, and reduced risk at a lower cost. Initial results with launch clients show a 24% increase in debt recovered and a 28% reduction in costs for businesses. Also, customer engagement increased by 68% with this customer-centric approach.
Ophelos was co-founded by Amon Ghaiumy, Paul Chong, and Qingchen Wang. The startup is also registered as a Pending B Corp. Ophelos’s wider mission is to help create a world where everyone is financially educated, empowered, and equal. By starting with debt collection today, the company aims to understand and diagnose many of the underlying issues surrounding financial health for both consumers and businesses and build more products that address these issues in the future.
Amon Ghaiumy, Co-Founder & CEO at Ophelos said: “We started Ophelos to create customer-centric products and services that nurture financially healthy and trusted relationships between consumers and businesses. The debt collection industry felt like a natural starting point because it allows us to understand, diagnose and address many of the underlying issues surrounding financial health. It’s also an industry in desperate need of change towards a more technology-driven, and most importantly, customer-centric approach. We want to create a world where everyone is financially educated, empowered and equal — reimagining the debt collection industry is just a first step towards our larger goal.”
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