All the latest news relating to the Repossession/Recovery Industry, national and international.
Browse all the latest newsOne of the fastest growing forces that is driving the Repossession/Recovery Industry forward is Technology and this section is dedicated to news-related articles.
Browse TechnologyAt the NARS 2011 event last week in Texas, we were fortunate to listen to the Keynote Speaker Mark Floyd, Vice Chairman and CEO of Exeter Finance Corporation, who provided the attendees with a candid presentation about the vehicle finance industry, the economic outlook that surrounds us and repossession outlook too.
Mark asked the questions: WHY ARE YOU HERE and reminded us of the NARS mission:
…”The mission of the North American Repossessors Summit (NARS) is to unite the collateral recovery industry by providing an open, collaborative environment for all people in the recovery and lending community to come together to address and improve the industry’s challenges and complexities…” Read the rest of this »
American Recovery Association’s Program Trains and Certifies Lenders, Members and Members’ Employees
DALLAS, March 15, 2010 – American Recovery Association, Inc. (ARA), the world’s largest association of recovery and remarketing professionals, celebrates a successful first series of its new Collateral Recovery and Remarketing Accreditation Program in nine cities across the U.S.
The accreditation program completed successful programs in Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Jacksonville, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; San Diego, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and sold out classes in Dallas, Texas before the 2011 North American Repossessors Summit (www.reposummit.com). Read the rest of this »
DETROIT (March 11, 2011) – SmartAuction, Ally Financial’s online used vehicle auction, received the 2010 “Best Performance – eChannel” award from Avis Budget Group. The award was announced at the 2011 Conference of Automotive Remarketing (CAR).
According to Greg Thibault, Avis Budget Group’s vice president of Fleet Disposal, SmartAuction helped Avis Budget Group remarket more vehicles from its fleet than any other online auction company in 2010 and had consistently high performance levels within several key measurement statistics.
”Avis Budget Group relies on all of its remarketing service providers to meet or exceed certain performance metrics each year, and Smart Auction delivered exceptional results for us in 2010.” Read the rest of this »
DETROIT – 1 March 2011 General Motors total sales in the United States rose 49 percent in February, as dealers reported 207,028 deliveries for the company’s four brands. For the second month in a row, the gain in total sales was driven by soaring retail demand for the company’s products. During the month, retail sales rose 70 percent – the highest year-over-year gain in the company’s history.
For the first two months of the year, GM’s total sales have risen 36 percent, while the company’s retail sales – those to individual consumers – have increased by 52 percent. Read the rest of this »
Are you in compliance? The Government’s FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is requiring financial institutions to be – so you need to be too!
Browse Red Flag Rule ProgramRecord-Breaking Numbers Help Participants Expand the Future of the Recovery Industry
Dallas, TX – March 14, 2011, American Recovery Association, Inc. (ARA), the world’s largest association of recovery and remarketing professionals, is proud to announce a record-breaking number of attendees and an astounding amount of money raised helped make its premier third annual industry event, the North American Repossessors Summit, a success.
This year’s NARS attracted the highest attendance of the past three years. Almost 400 people in the collateral recovery and remarketing industries, including collateral recovery professionals, clients and vendors from across the U.S., unified in Dallas this past weekend, March 5, 2011 to participate in open and collaborative discussions to address and improve the industry’s challenges and complexities. Read the rest of this »
Spring is in the air – finally! A new season and new event that you, not only need to take note of, but you need to attend.
NARS 2011 – Have you booked yet? No, then what are you waiting for? See the link ‘Your Industry. Your Future’ on the website or go directly to www.reposummit.org for the information. It’s an action-packed event that has an unprecedented array of speakers, including the keynote – the Vice Chairman and CEO of Exeter Finance, Mark Floyd. Some of you may remember him as the Co-Chief Operating Officer of AmeriCredit Corporation.
In addition, there will be lots of opportunity for you to network too and in the Network Room there will be a stellar list of vendors that you will want to visit too. …more…
Well, I think I have seen many things in my lifetime and definitely a great many things whilst working within the Repossession Industry, but seeing the trailers for the new movie “Repo Men” gives a truly new meaning to what the repossession industry could be in the future.
This movie is about the repossession of human organs.
‘Set in the near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit, it revolves around a man who struggles to make the payments on a heart he has purchased. He must therefore go on the run before his heart is repossessed’.
Of course, as the heart is an integral organ, this means that its removal means death! The contract signed for the purchase of the organ has not been met, payments have not been made. So the ‘Repo Men’ have a repossession order to retrieve their company’s collateral.
Armed with slightly different tools for the job than we are today. No truck payments, no fuel costs, no insurance, instead they have guns, knives and surgical tools to retrieve the asset that enables the debtor to live.
They track down the debtor and inevitably he or she is carved up and the collateral removed.
Makes for a lovely horror story, does it not? I wonder how far removed it really is?. Is this an insight of what the future may bring?
On that note, I swiftly move on to a future event that is just around the corner. In less than two weeks time, hopefully many of you will be attending the 2010 North American Repossessors Summit in Texas, where a variety of subject areas will take light that impact the future of the Repossession Industry.
The Repossession Industry has to move forward and work to become what it truly deserves to be recognized as – a professional, quality service that is second-to-none in any other service industry sector, and one that we can ALL be proud of – and that includes our clients!
Take a look at the advert below, give it a click and there you will find all the information you need. So what are you waiting for?
See you in a couple of weeks!
Susan
On March 5th I was a speaker on a panel at the North American Repossessors Summit. This was the first time that I had attended one of these conferences. I was impressed with the level of professionalism in the group and how well run the conference was.
However, I left the conference with the feeling that most of the attendees were frustrated. There are four national associations serving the industry (National Finance Adjusters, American Recovery Association, Allied Finance Adjusters and Time Finance Adjusters), plus several state associations. The industry is dealing with several significant issues: (1) a negative marketplace perception of the repossession business, (2) the costly distribution channel for repossession assignments from banks and finance companies through “forwarders” and (3) pending federal regulation that could possibly hold catastrophic consequences for their industry.
Issues like this are usually successfully addressed by an association that represents the entire industry. In the case of the repossession industry this does not seem to be happening. …more…
It was clear to us from the conversations at the North American Repossessors Summit (NARS) that this industry is being dragged to the alligator pits under the weight of the recent fuel price increases. Since mid-February, ARA has been researching various fuel surcharge formulas that could be applied to our business model. Although it may not be perfect, we have found one based on numbers that clearly demonstrate the added burden that recovery agents nationwide are currently enduring. It allows the flexibility to use regional cost differences in the equation and it is one that everyone in the industry can use. It also has an important facet we heard about from the stage at NARS – it needs to be able to reverse the surcharge as fuel prices begin to retreat. …more…
Forwarding….a hot, controversial topic for many repossession company owners but one that cannot be ignored. This was the theme of the session that I co-presented at the NARS 2011 event in Irving, Texas last week. And this article is my take on what forwarding means to our industry and how we should all work within it.
A Forwarding Company is nothing more than another client. Oh I know that many company owners detest who they are and what they think they are doing to the repossession industry but you should realize that the concept is nothing new. The idea has been around for years and is recognized by many external to our industry as Vendor Management Companies – VMCs. That is what forwarding companies are. …more…
Well, if you weren’t there, you missed a great event. Yes I am talking about the North American Repossessors Summit (NARS) 2011 which took place in Irving, Texas yesterday.
Set at the Omni Mandalay Hotel in Las Colinas, their facilities naturally lent to the delivery of a successful occasion, with an impressive level of customer service to match, from all levels of their employee team.
They came from far and near – repossession company owners, vendors, client company representatives and indeed the array of speakers – a collection of people that provided NARS attendees with an action-packed day that looked to the improvement of our industry now and for the future.
If there was one message to take away from this event, is that there was unity within the audience and an understanding that there needs to be change to survive the future and all that that brings. …more…
DETROIT (March 2, 2011) – Ally Financial Inc. (Ally) today announced that the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) will be repaid $2.7 billion from the sale of all the Trust Preferred Securities that Treasury holds in Ally. This represents the full value of Treasury’s investment in these securities. The offering priced today at 8.125 percent and is expected to close on March 7, 2011. In addition to the proceeds from this transaction, Ally has paid approximately $2.2 billion in dividends on the Treasury investment to date.
“This transaction marks a key step in the company’s plan to repay the U.S. taxpayer in full,” said Ally Chief Executive Officer Michael A. Carpenter. ”We are grateful for the taxpayer’s investment in the company during the financial crisis, which enabled Ally to play an integral role in the U.S. auto recovery and ensure that thousands of automotive dealers and millions of consumers had access to credit.” …more…
Fourth Quarter 2010 Earnings of $367 Million Reported
DEARBORN, Mich., January 28, 2011 – Ford Motor Credit Company reported net income of $2 billion in
2010, an improvement of $0.7 billion from earnings of $1.3 billion a year earlier. On a pre-tax basis, Ford
Credit earned $3.1 billion in 2010, compared with $2 billion in the previous year. The full year increase in pretax
earnings is primarily explained by a lower provision for credit losses and lower depreciation expense for
leased vehicles related to higher auction values, offset partially by lower volume and the non-recurrence of net
gains related to unhedged currency exposure primarily from cross-border intercompany lending. …more…
Having sat on the Planning Committee of the 2010 North American Repossessors Summit, as a totally independent participant, representing the everyday repossession company via www.theamericanrepossessor.com and ConnecTGo, Inc., I am very pleased and proud to say, that it was a pleasure to see the hard work of all those concerned come to fruition.
A great deal of hard work took place by Les Cook, Executive Director of ARA, Board Member Art Christensen, Dawn Wellington and Allison Bonlander of the PR company Wellington Group, Tricia Cockern of ARA and the admin team there, plus myself, spent many hours pulling this whole thing together.
For my input, I was able to draw from my experience of working with many repossession companies and experiencing their needs, plus my experience of having developed, planned and implemented numerous conference events, in other industry sectors. We didn’t get everything right, but we went a long way to perfecting the event by learning from the feedback we gained from those that attended previously and with that from this event too. With this information, we will strive to continually improve the Summit for next year and the years beyond that.
For many of you that did not attend last week, you missed a great event. Over 300 people attended. In fact, it was a ‘sell-out’ event! …more…
“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the CUSTOMER who pays the wages”. HENRY FORD (1863-1947), FORD MOTORS
“Every day were saying, “How can we keep this CUSTOMER happy? How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don’t, somebody else will”. Bill Gates, MICROSOFT
“There is only one boss – THE CUSTOMER. And he can fire everybody in the company from the Chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”. SAM WALTON, WAL-MART
There is no doubt, that running a business subsumes most of our time and because it does, sometimes we forget that our whole existence is predominantly due to our customers. And if you think any different, you are so wrong!
No-one is owed a living and by that I mean, just because we are in the repossession industry or any industry for that matter, and we may do a good job at providing the services we do, that we should automatically be given more work. That is not how business works. We have to earn that work.
I have been in earshot, many times, of company owners comments, feeling that it is their right that clients give them work, just because they are there. NO! That philosophy is a dangerous one to have. You have to compete for that work, and even more so today, as there are so many repossession companies in the market place that are more than ready to step in and take your business, because you are not providing the client with what they need.
Many companies see the customer as a ‘thing’ that buys our services and that ‘thing’ also as numbers that give us our income. We are so busy making plans to keep our customers away from our competitors, that do we really invest enough time and effort in finding out who is our customer, a fellow human being that also plans and has expectations and needs that need to be fulfilled. …more…
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