Marketlend Academy: How to balance the rigor of collections with caring for SMEs?

Listen to CEO and founder of Marketlend, Leo Tyndall, discuss how to balance the rigorous collection process with caring for SMEs. If you want to read the full transcript, please see below.

 

 

The way that we balance our collection process with the SMEs, is what I mentioned before that we contact them in the first day and second day. What happens is that representative calls them. And when he calls them he talks to them, and then he actually puts them in touch with our relationship manager. So we have a single relationship manager that is responsible for the area of post-settlement, and his job is to then communicate with that client and identify what’s going on. And if it’s a simple thing, and we’ve had them before where they’ve had one debtor who’s not paying on time or something similar, then he will work with them on how can we assist.

 

In some examples, what we’ve done is, we’ve then flown our financial controller, who is a chartered accountant, to go and sit with them and work out what’s going on with their cash flow. Maybe rejig some certain things in their cashflow, and suggest various options.We’ll also look at possibly getting limits against some of their debtors that they haven’t sold us the invoices to, to see if we can improve that position. We’ll also suggest to them to look at other options of possibly pulling on an equity investor, or something similar.

 

So it’s not as harsh as we turn them off. It’s very much a case of working with them. When I say time is the enemy, time is the enemy if we don’t work with them and we just turn off. And this is something we’ve always had SMEs communicate with us when you can’t pay. The worst event we can have is where they turn off all their phones and it all just becomes too hard and they went, “Uh-uh-uh, I just can’t handle it.”