# Murphy > Voice AI agents for financial remediation. Murphy holds collections > conversations across phone, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and email, inside the rules > the lender sets, and files every call against them. This file is generated from the same content the pages render, so it says exactly what the site says. ## Pages - [Home](https://www.getmurphy.ai/): what Murphy is and what changes after it takes the portfolio. - [What is financial remediation](https://www.getmurphy.ai/financial-remediation): the category, answered question by question. - [What is AI collections](https://www.getmurphy.ai/ai-collections): what the technology actually does on a call, and what it does not. - [Questions a collections team asks](https://www.getmurphy.ai/faq): 19 answers, grouped. - [Collections glossary](https://www.getmurphy.ai/glossary): 25 terms defined as the industry uses them. - [Careers](https://www.getmurphy.ai/careers) - [Privacy policy](https://www.getmurphy.ai/privacy-policy) - [Terms of service](https://www.getmurphy.ai/terms-of-service) ## What the homepage says Murphy contacts customers in arrears by phone, WhatsApp, email, RCS or SMS, and agrees a plan they can keep. Every conversation is auditable and compliant with your policy. ### The six guarantees - Never off script. Murphy speaks only within the limits you set. Every change is versioned and logged; every communication, voice or written, follows the rules you approved. - Nothing left unlogged. People forget to log calls; Murphy never does. Every interaction is filed to your CRM automatically, in full. - The right party, reached. Murphy skip traces across compliant data sources and connects, so your right party contact rate rises, not just your dial count. - The most natural voice. Murphy replies in under a second, on its own speech and language stack. No robotic pauses, just a conversation. - Deployed your way. On premise, your private cloud, or ours, with dedicated engineers from integration to the first live call. - From connection to payment. Wired into your dialer and CRM, Murphy sees the real balance, offers a plan the customer can meet, and takes payment promise on the call. ### The product, from first attempt to last instalment - Contact strategy: Reach them when they actually answer. Voice, WhatsApp, SMS, email, portal notices and letters run on one plan, under your caps on at what time, how often and at what intervals. Murphy learns when each customer actually answers and concentrates attempts there. Fewer attempts, a higher contact rate. - Skip tracing: Find a number that works, and reach the customer on it. Every number on file is scored on what happened when it was called and who actually answered. Murphy discards the wrong numbers, skip tracing fills the gaps, and the best number rises to the top, so more calls end in a right party contact instead of a dead dial. - Verification: Confirm who answered before anything is disclosed. Before ever mentioning the money owed, Murphy presents itself as an automated agent, states that the call is being recorded, and delivers any other disclosure your policy sets. It then checks who answered. Every step is timestamped in the recording, to the second. - Affordability assessment: Offer a plan they can actually afford. Murphy measures precisely what the customer can afford. Income, housing costs, essential spending, and what they already pay other lenders all come straight from the conversation. It checks the vulnerability markers each country requires, in the same call, and logs what it finds. The plan it offers is sized to what the customer can actually pay. - Negotiation: Agree a plan inside the limits you set. Payment instalments, a discount or one settlement, chosen inside a range set once for each product. Whatever the affordability check found comes into the negotiation with the customer, and the agent shapes the offer around it. When circumstances change, what was agreed before is still on the record. The portion of conversations that end in an agreed plan is how a collections floor measures itself. - Payment tracking: Follow the schedule, and pick the conversation up from it. Murphy checks every instalment against what actually arrives, and money arrives in parts, late, and sometimes weeks after it was due. A broken promise appears the day it breaks, so the next call starts there: the instalment that was missed, and what to do about it. The plan can still be changed while the customer is in contact. A month-end report shows the same miss three weeks later, when they are harder to reach. - Customer portal: Let customers read the plan back and accept it. The plan the agent agreed is already on their phone: the balance, the instalments and the dates, to read at their own pace, accept and pay. Someone who wanted time to think finishes there, on the same case and inside the same limits. Every one of those is a self cure that costs nobody a call. - Quality assurance: Every call checked against the rules, not a sample. Murphy scores every conversation against the rules that apply to it, the regulator's and the ones your own team wrote. Nothing is sampled and no call queues for review. Anything that fails, or that the check cannot settle on its own, reaches one of your reviewers with the second of the recording where it happened. - Auditability: Prove what happened, and who set the rules it happened under. Balance changes, agreements, payments and handovers all stay on one record for that customer, each linked to the call behind it. Every entry names the agent configuration and the policy version in force at the time, and the manager who approved them. Murphy records the reasoning behind every decision, so approving is a permission and the trail shows who allowed it and why. ### The numbers - +4 pts higher recovery rate than the bank's own call centre - -60% cost against collection agencies and in-house teams - 100% of calls fully compliant (measured in production, not yet a pilot claim) - < 0.9 s to reply, faster than a natural pause (measured in production, not yet a pilot claim) ### Who it is for - Banks: Every call a bank makes to a customer behind on payments is one the regulator can ask to hear. Your team decides what can be offered and what must be said. Murphy follows that on every call and keeps the recording and the review, so the proof exists before anyone asks for it. - Consumer finance: Personal loans come in thousands of small accounts, too many to call one by one with people. Murphy contacts customers early for you and works every account within the limits you set, whether that is a thousand accounts or a million. - Fintechs: Your loan book grows faster than any collections team you could hire and train. With Murphy, capacity is a setting. When the loan book doubles, the calls double with the same rules and the same quality, and your people handle only the conversations that truly need a person. - Collection agencies & debt buyers: Every client hands you a different rulebook and audits your calls against it. Murphy keeps a separate rulebook for every portfolio and shows results for every portfolio, so a client audit starts from complete records instead of a sample. - Utilities: A phone call about a small bill often costs more than the bill. Murphy makes small balances worth collecting: the channel each customer actually answers, with the rules on disconnection and vulnerable customers applied before anything else. - Telecoms: Cut off a customer who is behind and you usually lose them to another network. Your team sets what can be offered before the line is suspended, and what happens after. Murphy follows those rules from the first missed bill. - Asset finance: A machine that keeps working can pay off its own debt. A repossessed one sells at a loss. Your team sets what the asset is, what it is still worth and what an offer can look like, and Murphy works the account from the first missed payment. - Your industry: Murphy takes your rules, your tone and your channels. If your sector isn't listed, get in touch and we'll work through what yours needs. ## What is financial remediation ### What is financial remediation? Financial remediation is the work of resolving arrears by reaching an arrangement the customer can actually keep, rather than pursuing a balance until something gives. It treats someone who has fallen behind as a situation to resolve on workable terms, and it judges success by whether the arrangement survives, not by whether they agreed to it. ### How is it different from debt collection? Collection names the activity: recovering money that is owed. Remediation names the outcome the activity aims at: an account returned to a state both sides can live with. The difference appears in what each side counts. Collections targets count arrangements agreed. Remediation targets count arrangements kept, which is a smaller number and a harder one to move. ### Why does the distinction matter now? Two things changed. Regulators across major markets moved from judging outcomes to judging treatment, so how a customer was handled became evidence on its own. And the cost of an unaffordable arrangement stopped being invisible: a plan set above what someone can pay does not fail quietly, it fails one bucket deeper, worth materially less. ### What does financial remediation involve in practice? Reaching the account holder, establishing what they can genuinely pay, agreeing terms that sit inside the lender's own authority, and then watching whether the money arrives. The last step is the one that decides the outcome, and it is the one most often left out. An arrangement that nobody checks against incoming payments can fail for weeks before anyone notices. ### How is financial remediation measured? Four numbers carry most of the weight. Cure rate is the share of accounts that return to current. Roll rate is the share that fall into the next delinquency band. Recovery rate is the proportion of balance actually collected. And the share of arrangements kept, which is the one that separates activity from outcome. ### Who carries out financial remediation? Three groups, usually at once. A lender's own collections team handles early arrears. Third party agencies take later accounts, on commission or by purchasing the debt outright. And technology increasingly handles contact at the volumes people cannot, under rules the lender writes. ## What is AI collections ### What is AI collections? AI collections is the use of technology that holds the conversation with a customer in arrears, rather than technology that decides who a person should call next. The distinction is what the system does when the customer answers: a dialer hands the call to an agent, an AI agent works the call itself, within limits the lender sets. ### How is it different from collections automation? Collections automation moves work towards a person: it dials, queues, sorts and sends templated messages, and a human handles the conversation. AI collections handles the conversation. They divide on one thing: whether the system can answer something it was not scripted for, which is where a real conversation starts. ### What can an AI agent do on a collections call? Confirm who it is speaking to, give whatever disclosures the market and the lender require, establish what the customer can pay, and agree terms the lender has already approved. What it may offer, when it may call and when it must stop are set by the lender before any call is placed. ### Where does a collections platform fit? A collections platform is the system of record around the conversation: the accounts, the strategy, the rules, the reporting and the audit trail. AI agents are one way conversations get held inside it. The two are complementary, and a vendor that sells one usually integrates with the other. ### Is this the same as conversational AI? Conversational AI describes the part the customer notices, which is a system that understands speech and replies in it. Collections adds three requirements on top: the agent has to keep to limits somebody set, land on an amount the customer can genuinely afford, and leave proof afterwards of what was said. ### What does it change operationally? Capacity stops being a headcount question. A team that could work the first thirty days of arrears and pass the rest to a debt collection agency can work further down the portfolio, because the cost of a conversation no longer rises with the number of them. Which accounts get worked becomes a strategy decision rather than a staffing one. ### What does it not do? It does not decide policy. The lender keeps what may be offered, to whom, and who approves it. An agent that invents an arrangement outside those limits has malfunctioned. It also does not replace judgement on the accounts that need it, which is why every serious deployment has a handover. ### Who builds AI collections technology? Three groups, and they are not interchangeable. Collections platforms adding conversational features to a system of record. General-purpose voice AI vendors pointed at collections. And products built for arrears from the start. Murphy is in the third group, holding conversations across phone, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and email within the limits the lender sets. ## What Murphy is ### Is Murphy an AI collections platform, or a voice agent? Both. Voice AI agents hold the conversation, on the phone and over WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and email. The platform is everything around them: the rules your team writes, the limits the agent cannot go past, and a record of every call. ### What is AI financial remediation? Financial remediation means resolving arrears by reaching an arrangement the customer can keep. In AI financial remediation, voice AI agents hold those conversations instead of people. The goal is the same, the work is not. An agent asks the same questions on the thousandth call as on the first, never runs short of time to ask them, and files every answer against the rules you set. ### How is this different from debt collection software? Debt collection software organises work for your team to do. Murphy does the work. Collections automation usually stops at dialling, queueing and templated messages. Murphy handles the conversation itself, including establishing what the customer can pay and agreeing terms inside the authority you set. ### Is this conversational AI? Yes. Conversational AI is the part the customer notices. In collections it also has to keep to the limits you set on what the agent may offer, land on an amount the customer can genuinely afford, and leave proof afterwards of what was said. ### Is this loan servicing, or collections? Collections. Loan servicing runs a performing loan: billing, statements, the ordinary lifecycle. Debt servicing and collections begin once payments stop. Murphy works accounts in arrears, from early arrears onward. ### Does Murphy work business receivables, or consumer arrears? Both. Most of the work is consumer arrears, at banks, consumer finance companies, fintechs, collection agencies, debt buyers, utilities and telecoms. Murphy also works business to business, where there are fewer accounts, the balances are larger, and the creditor usually wants to keep the commercial relationship. On the business side that work is usually called accounts receivable or credit management, and the harder part is reaching the person who can authorise payment. ## Compliance and conduct ### Does the customer know they are talking to an AI agent? Yes. Murphy presents itself as an automated agent and states that the call is being recorded before it ever mentions the money owed, on every call. Any further disclosure your own policy or your regulator requires is delivered in the same opening, and every one of them is timestamped in the recording. ### What happens when someone asks to speak to a person? Murphy can immediately transfer the caller to a human agent or schedule a callback. Your team sets the rules for which happens and when. The conversation goes with the handover, so whoever picks it up can see what was already said and the customer does not start again. ### What if the person who answers is not the customer? Murphy checks who it is speaking to before it says anything about money. If the person who answers is not the customer, what Murphy may tell them depends on the law in that market and on the rules you set on top of it. ### Who decides what the agent is allowed to say and offer? Your team does. You set what an agent may offer, when it may call, and when it must stop. Murphy operates only inside those limits, and every call is scored against them. Every change you make is dated and logged, so you can match every call to a rule someone on your side approved. ### How many calls are checked for compliance? Every call. Murphy scores every conversation against the rules that apply to it, both the regulator's and the ones your own team wrote. Nothing is sampled, and the score lands with the call rather than in a monthly batch. Anything that fails, or that the automated check cannot settle, goes to one of your reviewers with the second of the recording where it happened. ### How do we prove to a regulator what happened on a call? Murphy keeps every balance change, agreement, payment and handover on one customer record, each linked to the call it came from. Each entry names the agent settings and the policy version in force at the time, and the manager who approved it. Murphy also records the reasoning behind every decision. When a regulator asks who authorised something and why, both answers are there. ### How does Murphy handle customers who cannot afford to pay? Murphy asks. Where a formal affordability assessment applies, it runs one, measuring income, housing, essential spending and what the customer already pays other lenders. Where none applies, it still asks enough to find the right plan from the options you allow. You set what it may ask, and if your rules say stop, it stops. ### What does the audit trail contain? One customer record holds every balance change, agreement, payment and handover, each linked to the call it came from. Each entry also names the agent settings and the policy version in force at the time, and the manager who approved it. ## How it works ### Which channels, languages and markets does it cover? Murphy runs on phone calls, WhatsApp, SMS, RCS and email, all working to one plan rather than as separate campaigns. It covers 14 markets and 25 languages today, across Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia Pacific. Your rules apply in every one of them, and each market adds what its own regulator requires: the notices a call has to open with, the hours it may be placed in, and how the recording is handled. There are more languages than markets because a market is rarely one language, so Murphy answers each customer in the one they use. ### How does our account data reach Murphy, and how do results return to us? You choose how. You can send us a file whenever you want. You can set a schedule, so accounts arrive and outcomes, promises and payments return on whatever cycle suits you. Or you can connect Murphy straight to your dialer and CRM, so it works from the current balance and files each call the moment it ends. ### Where does it run? On your own servers, in your private cloud, or in ours. Whichever you choose, Murphy engineers work with you from the first integration until the first live call. Where it runs is your decision. ## Results and measurement ### Which numbers should we expect to move? Contact rate and penetration rate show whether you are reaching people. Promise to pay rate shows whether those conversations end in an agreement. Cure rate shows whether accounts return to current. Roll rate shows whether they fall further behind. Recovery rate shows how much of the balance arrived. ### What would tell us early that it is not working? Customers agreeing to plans and then not paying them. If agreements rise but the money does not follow, the plans are above what those customers can afford. Murphy checks every instalment against the money that actually arrives. You see a missed payment on the day it happens, so you can change the plan while the customer is still willing to talk. ## Glossary ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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. ### 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.