The Pega Collections application, along with the Pega Customer Decision Hub™ for Financial Services application, provides an in-depth solution for negotiating offers and scheduling payment plans.

Payment cases

Promises to Pay (PTPs) define the date that the client should receive payment, the amount of the payment, how the client should receive the payment (by check, credit card, debit card, internal transfer, or wire transfer), and the associated payment method information.

Creating and resolving collections cases

Payment cases are created by using the Schedule payment plan service case. Payments can be resolved in three different ways:

• Payments batch file feed
• Manage Collection Case gadget
• Manually resolve the payment case

Payments batch file feed

A file listener monitors the file directory, and when the file arrives, calls the file service. The file service uses a parse rule (XML, structured, or delimited) to open and read the file, evaluate each input record, divide the records into fields, and then write the fields to the clipboard.

Configure the file listener CollectionBatch. The collection CSV file must be stored in the path as displayed in the Source location field.

Manage Collection Case gadget

The Manage Collection Case gadget is a demo utility that you use to create collection cases. This list contains Card and Loan account numbers.

Manually resolve the payment case

In this collections case, to resolve the collections case, the customer must complete all of the process request stages for "Take a payment" and the cases that are associated with the collection case.

Resolving a payment case

Once payment is received from any of the payment resolution channels, if the payment amount is greater than or equal to the delinquency amount, the collections case automatically resolves. If the payment is made online without creating a payment case, then Pega Customer Service for Financial Services is notified with the payment information by using the Payments File Feed. The payments file listener then invokes an activity to resolve the payment case. Once the payment case completes, the account automatically moves out of collections and the ManagePaymentsFromBatch activity updates the payment case.

Payment Received

To determine whether PTPs are Kept or Broken, the organization must provide a nightly batch file that contains the prior day’s payments. The PaymentsBatch File Listener executes the ManagePaymentsForCollections method, which in turn calls the ManagePaymentsFromBatch activity. This updates the collections Amount Due, and any Schedule Payment Plans and Payment Cases accordingly.

Broken promises

Where a promise is determined to be broken, the client can define a broken promise strategy with follow up letters, emails, and phone calls, or can choose to route the case back to the previous treatment strategy. When a payment Service Level Agreement (SLA) is missed, the Broken Promise Switch initiates a BrokenPromise offer flow that must be configured for each client.

Broken promises are often used as a statistical measurement of the collector’s performance related to promises to pay and for the customer’s performance in keeping payment commitments.