Like many of my industry friends and counterparts, I recently attended the RMAi annual conference in Vegas. I’m not alone when I say the event is a marathon of meetings, seminars, small-talk-and-walk encounters, and of course networking events.

I had a conversation with the owner of one of the fastest growing digital collections companies in the world. Despite his massive success and global footprint, he said his biggest bottleneck to growth is data integration. He’s in good company; I even wrote an article several years ago, Alleviating (some) Chaos in the ARM Industry, about how our industry insists on moving the same data in different ways. My article challenged the industry perception that there’s some secret sauce in the form and format of the data we exchange. Yet this remains a completely unsubstantiated business practice and most refuse to recognize that it perpetuates a serious roadblock to progress. Nevertheless, Vertican is compelled to protect its own intellectual property (IP) for obvious reasons – for as long as the industry refuses to adopt a standard, the form and format do matter. But they matter at the expense of real progress.

Let me explain.

Whether you are collecting, calling, scrubbing, suing, filing, serving, aggregating, reviewing, buying, originating, or selling accounts – you need to cooperatively maintain and transmit data. If you don’t do this reliably, in other words, if you don’t process your data with integrity, you will have real, quantifiable issues. That is why, in part, Vertican’s IP is valuable. As subject matter experts (SMEs), we have created a comprehensive standard that is loggable, auditable, and transparent for both Senders and Receivers. I have found that, more often than not, when a new market entrant wants to integrate with existing industry platforms, they either create a sub-par standard that invites problems or attempt to steal the proven and hard-won IP of existing players.

À la carte integrations must become a thing of the past. It takes a Sender a very long time to vet and test a new data standard. Combine that with the time and effort their Receiver firms and Vertican (for which by the way we charge) spend to streamline everything and make data integration possible. This time-suck is mild compared to the real waste that ensues. I’m talking about the loss from all the accounts that reach the statute of limitations during the time the Sender is in the extensive testing and transition process.

Consider all the inventory that will never see the light of day because an implementation took 18 months rather than eight months – that is a real and quantifiable excess. And, let’s not forget about the downstream costs attributed to the law firms/agencies and vendor consultants’ involvement.

Just like you, Vertican is in business to make money. However we frequently find ourselves working on projects that aren’t core to our business. As your partner and subject matter expert, my team should be spending its time and energy helping you analyze your data and improve your business. We should not be altering and operating your data flow. Vertican exists to improve peoples’ lives but this is one problem we cannot solve without you.

Back in Vegas, I was invited to provide my insight on industry technologies to the RMAi Board of Directors. I shared the cold, hard facts about data requirements’ place in the world and offered up a few analogies about the impacts of standardization. For example, when a wire transfer leaves one bank, any bank, and transmits to another ‘any’ bank, the data streams are identical. The ACH transmission process doesn’t change regardless of its origination or destination. Why? Because the government mandates the process. Why does the government mandate this stuff? Because if they didn’t mandate it, every bank would have a different process and every bank would charge for that process, and there’d be mistakes, and it’d be a mess … all because human hands would have to change the data format constantly!

The same notion can be applied to a million other examples where non-competitive regulation is critical. You can drive across the country and never worry about the gas nozzle at ANY gas station not fitting your fuel filler neck, no matter what model car you drive.

And speaking of Vegas again, the casinos must meet rigorous standards of operation and audit requirements, or – plain and simple – they’ll lose their licenses to operate. So, all the casinos out there are operating under the same standards yet some are more successful than others. That’s because their competition doesn’t lie in the regulations; it’s how well these businesses operate and compete while on a level playing field.

The same is true in legal collections. Your secret sauce doesn’t need to lie in the data you are moving. It should lie in what you do with it.

But we are still wasting time, money, and energy dealing with the movement and perpetual reconciliation of data; nobody knows and feels this more than Vertican.

Let’s help the industry get it right.

Last year, you rode the migration wave with us when we moved an enormous amount of data away from our own legacy system over to vExchange and that was super complicated. Well, when you deal with the transmission of real-time data through disparate systems, you’re not only navigating inside a complicated system … you’re inviting inaccuracies, mistakes, and compliance issues.

I know we can’t move the needle into place tomorrow, but this has been and will continue to be the vanguard mission to scale your business, my business, and our industry forward. Let’s be realistic about making it happen. We need to act in accordance with a non-competitive unification strategy on data standardization. As industry partners, we can help each other help ourselves, ultimately lower the cost to collect, and do right by the consumers we service.

If you have questions, comments, or want to work together on standardizing the non-standard standards, email me; I welcome your partnership.