In collections, technology used to live in the background. Now, it’s in the boardroom.

Across lenders, agencies, and legal shops, CIOs are being asked one thing:

"How will you use technology to improve margins?"

We spoke with CIOs across the consumer finance industry, from national debt buyers to mid-size agencies.

Here’s what the top performers are doing differently.

AI agents are the new employees and CIOs are their managers

This year, nearly every executive is evaluating virtual agents. So, the next question is pretty straight-forward:

"Who is responsible for making these AI employees work?"

The answer is usually the CIO. But there’s a big gap between a flashy demo and a system that actually works in production.

One leader explained this in the best way:

“It’s easy to make AI talk like a human. Making it act like a human is the real challenge.”

To close this gap, you need to have three things:

• A partner who understands the ARM industry, including workflows, regulations, and language.
  
• A product that integrates with your CRM, dialer, payment processor, and compliance stack.
  
• A model trained on real collections data, not the generic call center scripts.
  

That’s exactly why we built proAgent. It was created in collaboration with leading ARM companies and is designed for production (not just the demo room).

Help your COOs win by making human agents more effective

COOs are under immense pressure to reduce their cost-to-collect. Here, CIOs have an opportunity to help, by making operations more AI-native.

From real-world execution, we’ve identified 3 proven strategies that delivers results:

1. Notes automation: A small change with a big impact

Call notes are often overlooked, but they eat up 10-30 percent of an agent’s time. During that time, your agents are not generating any revenue.

With automated notes, agents can stay focused on live calls while AI handles documentation in the background.

This is one of the simplest ways to reclaim lost hours and improve productivity, without increasing headcount.

2. Reduce compliance costs without risk

Every team monitors calls, scores them, and responds to compliance gaps. However, manual QA no longer scales.

One of our clients now runs a 300-seat center with a single QA manager.

They shifted the rest of the QA budget to training and coaching to drive more revenue, with better compliance outcomes.

ScoreGenie, our agentic AI addition to proInsight handles everything from scorecards to giving personalized feedback to human agents.

It’s designed to help teams stay compliant and focus on what matters for long-term success.

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3. Build a modern self-serve system

Self-serve is where most digital strategies begin and it’s a pure tech play. This is where more CIOs are leading their effort.

Most payment portals in this industry are outdated, hard to manage, and frustrating to use.

Paying should be fast, intuitive, and frictionless because modern consumers are used to Apple Pay and Venmo.

Our solution, proPay gives ARM teams a portal that is easy to manage and helps drive digital payments with in-depth consumer insights.

But the best CIOs don’t just stop there. They are building systems where consumer insights can flow between every channel, because payments are just one part of the digital ecosystem.

For instance, your email performance should have a big impact on your engagement strategy. A portal that helps you personalize payment options based on individual consumer behavior.

That’s what proCollect enables with the Prodigal Intelligence Engine (PIE).

It brings together CRM data, emails, texts, and portal behavior to generate insights like best time to contact, channel preference for communication and personalized payment plans.

CIOs are leading this next phase of transformation

For years, CIOs worked to support the business. Today, they are leading it.

AI-native operations demands partners who deeply understand the collections industry and build solutions that this industry truly needs.

At Prodigal, we’re empowering CIOs to lead this transformation. We bring together collections intelligence, digital engagement, and AI agents on one platform.

Let’s talk! See how we can build your AI-native future together.

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