Rapid changes within the UK housing market have led to a situation where more and more people are financially obliged to rent or to live with family members for a far longer period of time before being able to purchase property of their own. In the field of debt collection this results in a far higher number of hidden ‘goneaways’, making it harder to spot those who have truly gone away and resulting in an increased number of mis-traces. The response from the tracing market is perhaps unsurprising to produce and develop an abundance of tracing solutions based on intelligent smart-data. However, as time goes on it becomes clear that use of these solutions can be seen as leading to a growing number of occurrences of mis-tracing. Essentially, these tracing solutions are simply indicative lead generators.

While the tracing companies do not as yet form a part of the regulatory scope of the new Financial Services Authority, those organisations which acquire the tracing services do. As such, any approved person who allows poor tracing solutions which result in mis-tracing to enter their product delivery chain can and will be held accountable. Debt recovery services need to adapt quickly to the changes in the regulatory environment, paying due care and attention not only to where data is sourced from but also how it is then validated and used.

There are a variety of reasons why mis-traces occur, including multi-bureaux data matching validation, the use of date of birth matches which result in un-validated addresses entering the database, non-validated new consumer addresses in CRA data submission reporting, failure to back out data which has been incorrectly updated by CRA data sharers after that data has been identified as incorrect and repeat CRA lead data capture.

As an ethical dent collection agency and one of the largest in the UK, Wescot is acutely aware of not only what the changes in the regulatory environment mean but also how the subsequent challenges must be met and overcome. Compliance is a priority at Wescot, which as a company not only leads the way in compliance standards but also in many cases helps to set the new regulations.  Posts from Wescot talk more about how compliance and careful analysis can help to reduce the incidences of mis-traces occurring.