Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Ed Wallen, CEO of C&R (Part 1)

Ed talks about combining humanity with Artificial Intelligence to create compelling outcomes in the Collections and Receivables world. Fascinating advances in FinTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Ed Wallen: I’m the CEO of C&R Software. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years building, marketing, and selling financial services solutions and systems. For the last 17 years or so, it’s been on the subsegment of that collections and recovery market.

I started my career doing it for US civilian intelligence agencies and then created my own company and took on a client called C&R Software at that time. They focused on collections and recovery. I helped them launch a new next-generation platform after a couple of years there. Then we did a market study and looked at the overall competitive landscape and saw that there was a competitive vacuum in this space. It’s a very specialized industry.

I decided to take an ownership stake in that company and sold my old one. I continued to enhance the platform and build the client base. Then I sold that to FICO. Within FICO, I grew that practice to a point where we got 450 clients in over 60 countries. From there, we recognized that the industry was really going in a different direction away from collections as an adversarial interaction and more towards consumer assistance and customer service. It was helping consumers regain financial footing.

I was able to spin my company back out of FICO. I’ve got a parent company that’s a holding company in Constellation Software. Constellation is a very large company – about $30 billion in market value. I happen to be one of the biggest businesses within Constellation. It’s worked out very well.

I’m very much an entrepreneur at heart. I’ve seen that opportunity to humanize the collection processes for corporations and consumers alike. We do that through the use of AI and empathy. Your audience probably never heard of us. We’re actually one of the large underpinnings of the global economy. We have $5 trillion in receivables at any given time.

Sramana Mitra: I have no problem at all with companies that we’ve never heard of. That’s the thing that we do – shine a light on territories and corners of industry where there are unique value propositions and niche problems that entrepreneurs are solving in unique ways. You are clearly a huge domain expert in the collections space. It’s a real pleasure to have you on the program. This is a thought leader in financial technology interviews.

I want to double-click down on the FinTech elements on how you’re using technology, how you’re using AI in achieving what you are trying to achieve, and the problems you are trying to solve. Let’s start there.

Ed Wallen: Combining the best of FinTech with human understanding is what my company does. It gives businesses the tools that enable the experience of a very targeted and individualized collection which creates a stronger and healthier economy. Credit is a huge engine for the global economy. That cycle of extending credits and having payments back to those lenders is a critical aspect.

I can give you examples of cases where that hasn’t worked where the collections regulations have been too onerous. But on the flip side, there haven’t been enough collections regulations. From a FinTech perspective, it’s about understanding your customer. It’s about intelligently using AI and machine learning in operations, and being able to get those models into operations. Then make very personalized decisions and have personalized messaging.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Ed Wallen, CEO of C&R
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