By Legal Futures Associate Visualfiles
Equivo, the newly launched dedicated recoveries business by UK law firm, Shoosmiths LLP and the national collections, recoveries and enforcement business, Chartsbridge, has invested in legal workflow and case management solution, Lexis® Visualfiles™. When fully deployed, the Visualfiles platform will streamline processes end-to-end across the firm’s three service areas – debt collections, recoveries and enforcement; facilitate compassionate engagement with customers and clients; and ensure a leaner, smoother and cost-efficient service. Equivo’s customers include varied types of organisations – from tier one banks and financial institutions, car leasing companies, commercial property owners and private clients through to other blue-chip organisations.
180 users are live on Visualfiles in Equivo’s litigation department and are benefiting from productivity gains as a result of the advanced process automation delivered by the solution. Many of the repetitive and administrative tasks have been automated and are completed by Virtual Legal Assistants alongside the VisualRobot™, freeing up time to enable personnel to focus on speedy resolution and the provision of a higher level of service for customers and clients.
“Debt recovery is a mature sector but, in most firms, it has typically been at the back of the queue for technology investments,” Saranjit Soor, CTO at Equivo, says. “Following on from the pandemic, today more than ever before, there is a need to provide a responsible service to deliver better quality outcomes and overall service experience to customers and clients. Often, people get into financial difficulties due to circumstances that are beyond their control and so, they mustn’t be penalised unfairly. Visualfiles is empowering Equivo to align service delivery with the firm’s core values, most important of which is to treat people compassionately.”
Visualfiles is enabling Equivo to meaningfully engage, both with customers who have monies owed to them, and clients for whom the debt is being collected. The customised dashboards are assisting Equivo personnel to help customers manage their finances through affordable payment plans and pre-empt unnecessary escalation by identifying critical events in a timely manner so that there is satisfactory resolution for all parties. This empathetic, fair and structured approach to customer engagement is facilitating the delivery of higher levels of service.
“Equivo is taking a traditional process for debt recovery, and applying new technology, processes and thinking, to make it efficient, profitable and most of all, fair,” Simon Farthing, Commercial and Marketing Director at LexisNexis Enterprise Solutions, comments. “In doing so, Equivo is providing a different choice of service and experience that cannot be easily replicated by other players in the marketplace.”
This initial go-live is only the start. In addition to the roll out of Visualfiles to all service areas, Equivo is exploring the API landscape across the Visualfiles ecosystem to create customised data warehousing and collaborative reporting capabilities. The firm has plans to integrate Visualfiles with other business systems as well as Equivo’s website to facilitate a single customer and client view across all services.
Equivo chose Visualfiles because it’s a proven platform for delivering excellence in the debt recovery sector and enables it to differentiate its service from the competition. The solution offered the firm the ability to go to market in the shortest possible time whilst providing advanced capability to build workflows and processes to enable this ground-breaking approach to service delivery in this sector.
Soor concludes, “This is an exciting time for Equivo. The firm is challenging an out-dated approach to service delivery. At the same time, it is creating a technology foundation that will allow the business to seamlessly scale profitably, and even nimbly venture into new markets when the opportunity arises.”
