With the New Year upon us, it is a good time to look back at 2022 and reflect on what was and what could yet be. Challenges faced, lessons learned, and goals set for the year ahead.
The changing landscape in 2022
The unique responsibility of crisis-era debt collection
This year was a year of shocks and 2023 might have many more twists and turns in the road to come for credit management. The world is in the midst of a new crisis even if a name has not yet been chosen for it. At the end of 2022 the news is full of stories of families trying to make ends meet in the cost-of-living squeeze.
The pandemic-related monetary and fiscal expansion took a sharp turn towards tightening in 2022, as nation governments and central banks grapple with persistent inflation and an economic slowdown.
While consumers’ financial cushions are shrinking, their winter holiday spending didn’t necessarily plunge. Instead, many chose to erode their savings and take new loans to maintain their consumption level. Without financial help, people may soon find out that moratorium measures gave only temporary relief from financial stresses that in many cases will prove to have been milder than the situation that lies ahead.
This is where human-centric debt collection has a unique power and responsibility to help consumers get back on track, to ensure that their repayment plans are affordable, and to guarantee that they are not sliding into over-indebtedness.
Banks are better prepared today
But there is more comforting news. Banks are robust and well capitalized today and have continued reinventing their business for the digital age. The shocks have not been generated from within the financial system, unlike in 2008 and the financial sector is well positioned to be a constructive problem-solving force in the current crisis.
Debt collection is a higher priority on banks’ innovation agenda – with its new role of improving financial wellbeing for borrowers and the lending system as a whole, in line with macroprudential and consumer protection regulations.
Innovation and human-centric design in Loxon’s focus
In this uncertain context, Loxon has retained its focus on innovation and new product development in 2022 and will continue to do so in 2023.
Placing human-centricity at the heart of our company’s values, we helped a growing number of banks to advance on their customer-centric digital transformation journey as well as to manage their credit risk from debt origination to debt collection, delivering valuable outcomes for the people and businesses that rely on them.
Loxon’s achievements in 2022
#1 Milestone: Go-to-market with new cloud-native next-generation collection platform
Banks across the globe are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation, and to adapt in line with changing needs and regulations. Often, almost from one day to the next. After several years of committed effort on the part of Loxon’s R&D teams, the new technology platform that underpins Loxon’s future banking solutions, is now live. It is cloud-native and composable.
Our new generation business solutions created on the platform gain exceptional flexibility through not only the strong business parameterisation capabilities but also through our-state of the art. integrated no-code environment.
2022 marked the successful launch of Loxon’s next-generation debt collection Software-as-a-Service. Lenders particularly prefer the system for its time-to-value, flexible no-code configurability, dynamic scalability, and the benefits of continuous innovation, which are all essential to provide a leading edge for innovative banks. Learn more about our new composable collection system here.
A growing number of our clients benefit from the new debt collection SaaS. Implementations are in progress in a diverse set of geographies. New SaaS clients include Capital Bank of Jordan, neobank Blink in Jordan, and a large financial provider in the Philippines. Also 365 Bank (former Postova Banka) in Slovakia is layering Loxon’s self-service engagement solution on top of its existing on-premises collection system.
The intense interest in our new composable approach shown by early adopters bears testament to the strength of the new generation Loxon product based on the newest technologies and to the business value that Loxon has consistently provided for their clients in the past 20 years.
#2 Milestone: Composable partner experience
A further major milestone was achieved when Loxon’s implementation partner successfully completed business configurations of a project on our new platform. Loxon is committed to build long-lasting relationships in a vivid partner ecosystem with composable application experience. The ongoing validation of the no-code configuration toolset shows highly promising results so far.
Loxon has joined forces with its new partner in order continuously to develop the toolset and reach scale-up phase in the New Year. This partnership model will allow even more banking clients to benefit from the speed, flexibility, and adaptive capabilities of Loxon products.
Challenges: The “year of shocks” has been shaky for Loxon, too
Change is Loxon’s natural state, but it doesn’t mean that everything goes smoothly. 2022 was a challenging year in many ways. The success of our new platform’s go-to-market has resulted in more work than ever before for our innovative product teams.
Our scrum teams were restructured and re-trained quickly to work with the new tools. Frictions and bumps due to the organisational change did arise, but the platform proved to be easy to learn to use, and as the user base expanded, more and more feedback fuelled the learning loop.
But 2022 was not without some setbacks. The transition to remote work and the great retention challenge have been real tests for the organization. Furthermore, the war in Ukraine had immediate impact on the clientele and caused delays in the decision-making processes. Losing Sberbank as client meant a sudden and significant revenue loss, that was not fully offset by the company’s growth elsewhere.
Turning challenges into opportunities also in 2023
Out of all the things we have achieved this year, we are most proud of our customers’ trust in us. For the second year in a row, Loxon has been honoured as winner of the Customer Satisfaction category at the Chartis RiskTech100 awards.
After 2021, in 2022 Loxon was awarded again the Best Risk Management Solution Provider at the MEA Finance Banking Technology Summit & Awards 2022 in Dubai. This success represents further recognition for Loxon after the company improved eleven places in Chartis’ RiskTech100® 2022.
We are committed to continue delivering excellence to our customers, to help them build the financial services of tomorrow, today.
Stay tuned for 2023
Learn more about our future plans in our next article, which we will publish in the first week of January 2023.
If you got this far, you will probably also enjoy our white paper and infographics about the latest digital collection trends. Read more about how other banks seek to make their collection systems crisis-resistant.
You may also listen to our podcasts and subscribe to our newsletter.
We wish a Happy New Year and stable finances for all financial services providers and their customers!