Expert Revenue Systems (XRS)

Wolverhampton City Credit Union selects XRS Collector as its Credit Control Software Partner

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 14:55:20 +0000

Expert Revenue Systems (XRS), a leading supplier of credit control and collections software, are pleased to announce that Wolverhampton City Credit Union have selected it’s cloud-based XRS Collector solution to enable more efficient and effective collection of member arrears.

Wolverhampton City Credit Union (WCCU) is a not-for-profit financial cooperative, owned and controlled by their 9000+ members who live, work, volunteer or study in the area. Their mission is simple “to give our members a brighter financial future by providing ethical, honest and fair financial cooperative”.

XRS Collector will seamlessly integrate with Wolverhampton’s core banking solution (Progress Banking) to provide a powerful collections tool that is flexible, intuitive, and easy to use. By automating workflow, communications, card payments, and promises to pay, XRS Collector will dramatically improve productivity and member engagement leading to higher arrears recovery and lower bad debt provisions and write offs.

“Wolverhampton City Credit Union is proud of our commitment to the local community and our excellent member service record. This partnership with XRS will extend and improve our credit control strategy and the options available to our members. We aim to make it as easy and convenient as possible for members to engage with us and resolve their arrears in a sustainable way.

We are delighted to be working with XRS, they have an excellent reputation and everything we were looking for in a modern credit control system.”
Rob Shearing, CEO, Wolverhampton City Credit Union

“We are pleased to welcome Wolverhampton City Credit Union as the latest in our growing number of UK Credit Union clients. We are proud to be working with such a highly regarded community-focused organisation.

In the current economic climate, many Credit Unions are choosing to future-proof their credit control capability by implementing specialist credit control systems to reduce manual effort and lead to more efficient and effective credit control. We look forward to a productive partnership that benefits both WCCU and most importantly, it’s members.”
Pat Kelly, Managing Director, XRS

Transave Credit Union selects XRS Collector as its Credit Control Software Partner

admin — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 16:02:11 +0000

Expert Revenue Systems (XRS), a leading supplier of credit control and collections software, today announced that Transave Credit Union will deploy its cloud-based XRS Collector solution to enable more feature-rich, efficient, and effective collection of member arrears.

Transave Credit Union, a Sheffield based, not-for-profit, financial co-operative was founded in 1996. Total assets currently stand at over £40 million with more than 16,000 members. Membership is offered through over 60 organisations, Unite the Union and certain industrial sectors throughout the UK.

XRS Collector will seamlessly integrate with Transave’s core banking solution to provide a powerful collections tool that is flexible, intuitive, and easy to use. By automating workflow, communications, card payments, and promises to pay, XRS Collector will dramatically improve productivity and member engagement leading to higher arrears recovery and lower bad debt provisions and write-offs.

“We selected XRS as our credit control software partner because of their market leading expertise supporting Credit Unions in Ireland, the UK and the US. Our existing system was overly manual, inflexible, and lacked key functionality. XRS are a forward-thinking organisation, and their offering aligns with and supports our goals and values. As a community-based lender, we aim to collect arrears in an efficient yet ethical and responsible manner, particularly for members experiencing financial difficulty.

Simple but proactive approaches, such as using each member’s preferred communication method and simplifying the payment process will help us increase repayment rates and retain members”.
Ian Sibbald, Operations Director, Transave Credit Union

“At XRS we have a vision to support and empower Credit Unions who are striving to modernise their debt collection strategies. Transave Credit Union offer their members a fairer, ethical alternative to both mainstream financial providers and payday loan providers. We’re proud they have selected XRS Collector to accelerate their impressive track record of growth and social impact.”
Pat Kelly, Managing Director, XRS

XRS Looks to the Future Through the Cloud

admin — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 09:25:35 +0000

Debt collection has been around longer than the existence of money itself. Today, debt recovery plays a central role in the credit industry as more and more people apply for mortgages, auto financing, student loans and healthcare assistance. Thankfully, the days of nagging telephone calls and repetitive paper reminders are becoming a thing of the past. Technology has taken their place, improving everything from processing times and financial accuracy to cyber security and improved regulatory compliance. More importantly, financial institutions can write off fewer bad debts.

One company leading this charge is Dublin-based Expert Revenue Systems (XRS), a credit management software services firm that helps businesses improve their debt recovery and credit control. Their specialized software is used by major Irish and international banks, as well as more than 60 credit unions and major consumer telecom providers to improve their credit management and recovery processes.

XRS offers advanced functionality, automation and insight to dramatically improve efficiency and reduce costs. But as anyone in the IT industry knows, state-of-the-art technology can become outdated faster than a bitcoin transaction on payday. As the company’s 30th anniversary ticked by, XRS identified the need for several major IT upgrades to their hosting environment.

XRS turned to Sungard Availability Systems (Sungard AS), its long-time technology partner for resilience and recovery, to put together an AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud solution that would help them drastically enhance their responsiveness and security. Their goals for the project were straightforward but aggressive:

The Catalyst for Change

For XRS, the name of the game is persistence: producing a debt recovery solution that does what it says it will do, without being annoying. Their flagship product – the RMS Recovery Management System – makes sure the collection process is performed at the perfect time while remaining flexible enough to allow clients to make payment arrangements that work for both sides. With RMS, nothing gets forgotten or falls through the cracks.

That’s the same principle that guided the technology refresh process with Sungard AS: putting together a cloud recovery solution that’s as flexible and scalable as the XRS products demand, but with ample security and resilience to recover at a second’s notice should an incident alter the equation.

With a rapidly shifting customer base, XRS’ IT team needed to adopt the latest Windows 2016 environments since their existing servers were running on older 2008R2 technology and nearing end-of-life. This was the most urgent item on their to-do list. They also determined they needed to further strengthen their security posture, bolstering their disaster recovery capabilities and building in greater resilience.

But the biggest change was their desire to move to the AWS public cloud. The agility, scalability, resilience and reliability were all attractive to XRS. What’s more, the speed of transformation was particularly appealing. Knowing Sungard AS was rapidly expanding its public cloud footprint and gaining AWS certifications and capabilities at a breakneck pace, XRS knew they were up to the task.

Taking the First Steps

XRS started the project by asking Sungard AS to perform a GAP analysis to measure current performance and plan for improvement. They soon discovered that AWS had far more to offer than any other data center solution, with the greatest agility. Armed with this insight, Sungard AS then designed a technology transformation plan that built upon its Cloud Recovery – AWS managed solution, providing immediate improved resiliency with a 4-hour Recovery Time Objective (RTO) SLA. With Sungard AS’ solution, workloads can be hosted on-premise or within another AWS Region, and then recovered to the customer’s desired AWS Region.

Cloud Recovery – AWS lets customers combine the power of hyperscale cloud with the IT resiliency expertise of Sungard AS into a complete recovery solution. This includes onboarding, implementation and ongoing monitoring and management, so they can decrease recovery time, get ready access to business data, prioritize apps and data, and consolidate and simplify recovery.

Sungard AS served as XRS’ backup system, which made sense having architected the new solution in the first place. Thereafter Sungard AS would manage day to day activities for XRS – a process they were already familiar with. By relying on Sungard AS to manage their hosting environment, XRS could focus on configuring apps for their own infrastructure versus worrying about hosting requirements.

The Results

When the IT transformation was complete, XRS achieved all its goals – lower costs, a state-of-the-art cloud environment, speedier response times and best-in-class security – without losing a minute of up time. Storage is mirrored across multiple AWS availability zones, guaranteeing XRS will be protected through any type of catastrophe. The ticketing process (logging changes or making upgrades to the technology infrastructure) takes place instantaneously. More importantly, XRS can scale their solution up or down based on a moment’s notice.

The hard work of revamping their entire technology environment gave XRS the peace of mind to move forward with their next project: a web-based solution that will disrupt the market and produce significant savings for customers. It’s too soon to release details, but XRS is sure that once again they will shake up the market – with the confidence they will deliver enduring customer satisfaction.