Every day, many thousands of people have to deal with the prompts, solicitations and threats of creditors and debt collectors. And yet, despite being such a crucial part of our credit-driven economies, this is a business that remains poorly understood, with its inner workings largely hidden from public view. In my recently published book Lived Economies of Default I try to change this.
Misconceptions about debt collection abound. It is still, for instance, a widely held assumption that debt collection first and foremost involves the knock on the door - the heavy set bailiff coming to reclaim what possessions he can towards the repayment of the debt. Yet by and large contemporary debt collection is at once much more mundane and much more clever than that. Irrespective of the impression given by programmes like The Sherrifs Are Coming, this is an industry that is now overwhelmingly concerned with technologies of mass contact: the phone, the letter and, increasingly, text messages, emails, and automated voice messages. Successful contemporary debt collection means combining these various approaches in as profitable a way as possible, while dealing with potentially thousands of accounts simultaneously.
Nowadays, this work also routinely involves sophisticated data-driven forms of analysis, designed to identify which types of debtors to contact and how exactly to do so. This is further helped by the conduct of what can only be described as experiments - experiments in which groups of defaulting debtors are tested for their propensity to respond more in one way rather than another. Many will remember the controversies that surrounded researchers' experiments with the emotions of an unwitting section of Facebook's userbase. What relatively few people understand is not only that very similar experiments are increasingly common across a wide range of domains – debt collection as much as online dating for instance – with consent rarely explicitly asked for or given, but also that this has been going on for a long time. As far back as the 1960s, debt collectors in the US designed experiments deliberately designed to test the emotional responses of debtors by experimenting with different letter designs and sequences, with sample sizes in the hundreds of thousands. In this sense, debt collectors truly are one of the ancestors of the Facebook experiment.
