Glossary
The collections vocabulary, defined
The words collections teams use every day, defined plainly.
Financial remediation
Working with someone who has fallen behind to reach an arrangement they can actually keep, rather than chasing the balance until something gives. It is measured by whether the arrangement is still being paid months later, not by whether the customer agreed to it, which is why the amount is set against what they can genuinely afford.
The category Murphy is built for, and the reason the product measures whether a plan is kept rather than whether it is signed.
AI collections
Technology that holds the conversation with a customer in arrears, rather than technology that decides who a person should call next. The line falls on what happens when the customer answers: a dialer hands the call to an agent, an AI agent works the call itself, within limits the lender sets.
What Murphy is, and the reason the limits are the lender's to set rather than ours.
Affordability assessment
I&E assessment
Calculating what someone can genuinely pay, by asking about their income, their housing costs, the spending they cannot avoid, and the payments they already make to other lenders. Most teams call it an I&E, for income and expenditure. A figure built from those four holds up better than one somebody agrees to under pressure and then misses.
Where it applies, Murphy takes these figures from the conversation itself rather than assuming them. Whether it runs at all follows the market and the lender's own configuration.
Arrears
Delinquency
Money that is owed and late. An account goes into arrears the day it misses a scheduled payment. The arrears are what is unpaid so far, which is not the same as the whole balance outstanding. Accounts that are a few weeks late behave very differently from ones that are months late, so most teams treat them as separate problems.
Bucket
Ageing bucket, aging bucket
A delinquency band, usually thirty days wide, that groups accounts by how overdue they are: 1 to 30 days, 31 to 60, and so on. The further an account slips, the less likely it is to recover, so the band an account is in determines how it is worked and by whom.
Charge-off
Write-off
The point at which a lender stops counting a debt as something it expects to collect and takes it off the books. The customer still owes the money. It can still be chased, or sold to somebody else. What changes is the lender's accounting, not the debt.
Collections and recoveries
C&R
Two halves of the same job, shortened to C&R, split by how far gone the account is. Collections handles accounts that are late but still salvageable, and tries to bring them back up to date. Recoveries handles accounts that have already defaulted or been written off, where the realistic best outcome is a settlement or a long plan rather than a return to normal.
Contact rate
The share of attempts that reach a person. It is the first constraint on any collections operation, because nothing else can happen until someone answers a call or replies to a message. It is also the number most often confused with right party contact rate, which is stricter.
Cure rate
The share of late accounts that return to current within a period, with the arrears cleared and payments resumed on their normal schedule. It is the standard measure of early collections, because a cured account has left the arrears behind rather than still being managed inside them.
Days past due
DPD
How many days have passed since the oldest missed payment. DPD 30 means the earliest unpaid instalment was due thirty days ago. Almost everything follows from this number. It decides which band the account falls into, which team handles it, and what a regulator expects you to have done by then.
Dialer
The system that places outbound calls, working through a list in the order and at the pace it is given. It holds the calling rules, the attempt history and the do not call list, which makes it the record of who was called and when. What it does not usually decide is who should be called, which comes from the strategy layer above it. Anything that places calls has to work with the dialer rather than around it.
Murphy can connect to an existing dialer and file each call to your CRM as it ends, or work from scheduled imports and exports where no integration is in place.
Forbearance
A formal, temporary easing of a customer's obligations by agreement: a payment holiday, a reduced payment for a set period, a pause on interest. A payment plan reschedules what is owed. Forbearance suspends or reduces it for a time. Most markets regulate and report the two differently.
Instalment plan
Payment plan
An agreement to clear arrears in scheduled parts over time rather than in one payment, recorded on many systems as an arrangement to pay, or ATP. The schedule sets the amount, the number of instalments and the dates. A plan is counted as kept only while the payments arrive as scheduled, so the amount is normally set against what the customer can afford rather than against what clears the balance fastest.
Non-performing loan
NPL
A loan where the borrower has stopped paying and full repayment is now in doubt, reported as an NPL. The usual line is ninety days past due, though accounting and regulatory rules set the exact definition, not the lender. Crossing that line changes how much the lender has to set aside against the loan and how it reports it, which is why the boundary is drawn so carefully.
Promise to pay
PTP
A commitment from a customer to pay a stated amount on a stated date, logged on most systems as a PTP. Most collections operations count these as their output. The count of promises made and the count of promises kept are two separate figures, and the second is always the smaller of the two.
Murphy watches each instalment against what actually arrives, so a broken promise appears on the day it breaks.
Quiet hours
The times of day when contacting a customer about a debt is not permitted. Law or regulator guidance sets the window, and it differs by country. In most markets a single breach here is a reportable event, not a quality issue.
Recovery rate
The proportion of an outstanding balance that is actually collected, expressed against what was owed. It measures money, not accounts. That is what separates it from cure rate. An account can pay a lot and still not cure, and a portfolio can cure well while recovering little.
The figure Murphy reports against a lender's own call centre, on 0 to 90 day accounts, measured as share of balance collected so the basis is stated rather than assumed.
Right party contact
RPC
Reaching the actual account holder, as distinct from reaching whoever answered. Teams track it as RPC, and as a rate against all contacts made. In most markets the law limits what anyone may say to a third party, so until the caller knows who answered, the conversation cannot go any further.
Murphy confirms who answered before it states a balance.
Roll rate
Migration rate
The share of accounts that slip from one band into the next, deeper one over a period. It is the opposite side of cure rate, and the number most collections teams are really judged on. Every account that slips is worth noticeably less than it was a month ago.
Self cure
Natural cure
An account that returns to current without anyone having worked it. A good share of early delinquency is a missed direct debit or an oversight, and it resolves without anyone contacting the customer. Self cures are normally reported separately from accounts the team worked, because the two say different things about the same portfolio.
Settlement
Full and final
An agreement to close an account for less than the full balance, usually in one payment or a few. A single payment version is a full and final, or F&F. The discount is what the lender pays for certainty, but the consequence lands on the customer's credit file, where a partly settled account reads worse than one paid in full. It only closes the matter if the waiver of the remaining balance is express and in writing.
Share of balance collected
Money collected measured against the balance it was owed on, over a defined period. The name states what the percentage is calculated from, which recovery rate and cure rate do not, so two figures using this label can be compared directly.
Skip tracing
Tracing
Locating a customer who can no longer be reached at the contact details on file. Data protection rules govern what can be gathered and from where. It comes before collections rather than being part of it. Nobody can work an account until the customer is found.
Success rate
The share of conversations that get to whatever you decided counts as success: an agreement, a payment, a dispute resolved. It measures activity, not money. It tells you whether the way you are reaching people works. It does not tell you how much money arrived.
Vulnerability
Vulnerable customer
A customer circumstance, such as illness, bereavement, mental health or serious financial hardship, that means standard collections treatment could cause harm. Most regulators require a firm to identify it and act on it rather than record it, which means the treatment of the account changes from the point it is identified.