Credit, Collections & Insolvency News
According to the headlines, shoppers flooded back to the high streets of England when non-essential stores reopened on 15 June. In that week, queues stretched around the block for the most popular stores, and footfall was up 45% on the previous week. Is this good news for retail? Not entirely. When compared to the same…
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Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), the short-term variant of retail point of sale finance, has been growing at a pace in the UK, with the now almost ubiquitous presence of options from Klarna, Clearpay, PayPal or smaller firms at online fashion store checkouts. Concerns about BNPL aren’t completely new, but in recent weeks a Twitter-based…
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Despite spending considerable amounts of money on operational resilience, COVID-19 is shining a light on a chronic under investment in IT systems which is now failing customers. Multiple independent sources have conferred to elanev that UK lenders are failing to adequately account for regulator mandated payment holidays in response to COVID-19. Details of failures at…
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For collections teams, the coronavirus outbreak has created a paradox. How to deal simultaneously with escalating volumes, changing FCA guidelines and high customer expectations – all while experiencing significant frontline staff shortages. It’s undoubtedly a mammoth task. So where should you begin? Rapid changes to millions of people’s incomes, triggered by the outbreak, mean huge…
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Would you speak to a stranger about your financial situation? Would you discuss your salary, how much you owe, and the amount of disposable income you possess? No? Can’t say I blame you – I wouldn’t either. However, if you’re in the business of debt management, you’re asking people to do this every day. The…
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We have seen extraordinary levels of Government-backed support made available to the public and businesses alike in responding to the health crisis by our banks through payment holidays, grants and the furlough scheme. While we keep collective fingers crossed that the economy bounces back quickly, the consequences of loan payment freezes, mortgage payment holidays and…
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Right now, financial wellbeing is a widespread preoccupation for the country; from bleak reports of redundancy and furlough, to questions of how financial institutions will adapt to a post-pandemic world and support these customers. In the UK alone, 3.1 million households are in serious financial difficulty as a result of the lockdown and, with so…
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We know that there’s an intrinsic link between consumers with problem debt and their likelihood of being vulnerable, and Equifax has seen from its own experience and from independent research that where vulnerability is present, debt collection can be more challenging. Increasingly the topic of vulnerability has become more of an imperative for lenders. But…
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The temporary suspension of wrongful trading provisions introduced in March 2020 and initially set to run until 30th June 2020 will continue with the implementation of the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act on 26th June 2020. However, now the threat of personal liability has been significantly reduced, company directors must remain attentive to other considerations…
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Are we all potentially vulnerable? The answer is that we’ve all been vulnerable to a greater or lesser extent at some point in our lives and when those circumstances have arisen it has affected us in different ways. The events of the last 6 months have thrown that into sharp relief, with the prospect of…
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The government has been fast to react to the negative economic impact of the measures they have taken in response to COVID-19. These have generally been received positively by business. However, as a result of the rapidity of the response there will be unintended consequences. In this year’s budget, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the…
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Non-essential shops have been allowed to re-open for business by the government. As a business owner in the retail industry, this has no doubt been a welcome announcement, however, you would be forgiven for not thinking that this means ‘back to normal.’ The next few months will be critical, and it will no doubt be…
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The Corporate Insolvency and Governance Bill, which was introduced on 20th May 2020, is a welcome development that will deliver a number of changes to UK company law, including enabling companies in the middle of a restructuring and rescue to continue trading. The Bill To help assist companies through the coronavirus pandemic, the Bill contains…
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