Perch Capital is a specialist credit management company that purchases debt portfolios. Their mission is to empower customers to take control of their finances and help them to achieve financial wellbeing.
Perch Capital acquires large consumer loan books using advanced bespoke data science analytics to price the expected recovery and returns from the loan books. The Group has completed over 120 individual transactions over the last 4 years.
Perch Capital is a part of the Perch Group, which also includes an FCA authorised debt resolution agency – ACI, an SRA authorised firm of solicitors – TM Legal Services, and a doorstep reconnection business. All which service Perch Capital customers as well as several other non-group related clients.
Acquired.com spoke with Perch’s, Head of Finance to discuss taking steps to make it as simple as possible for customers to transact with them, and how Acquired.com’s multi-acquirer payment solution has benefitted the business.
What have been your key priorities over the past few years?
A key priority for the business has been improving our digital collection operation and the customer experience. To achieve this we have upgraded our websites, customer communications, payment portal, and payment options. It is important to us that customers can use our website to serve their needs easily.
What were the key elements that appealed to you when choosing a payments solution?
We wanted to ensure that when a customer wants to make a payment, they can do this easily and benefit from a simple customer journey. To achieve this simplified experience for our customers, we wanted to use a payments solution which is highly efficient, rich with information and MI, and extremely reliable.
What are the main payment challenges you faced before working with Acquired.com?
We were very limited in the transaction information available to use prior to working with Acquired.com. We couldn’t easily identify the customer by the transaction or understand the trends in result messages. We were also restricted to one acquirer which meant that if we experienced any downtime, we were not able to take any card payments.
As the bulk of our customer payments come from card payments, we wanted a payment solution which was linked to multiple acquirers and meant we could provide an enhanced customer experience and greater confidence in the reliability.
What elements of Acquired.com’s solution have you noticed the most benefit from?
Load balancing is a key win for our business and for our customers. Spreading transactions across multiple accounts not only helps with our business contingency planning, but it also means our business can remain operational while one of our suppliers has an issue.
We have really benefitted from Acquired.com multi- acquirer gateway. Providing the flexibility to switch between acquirers reduces the risk of being unable to authorise transactions and ensures we maximise customer payments.
Also, the Acquired.com Hub provided us with a clear overview of each transaction and detailed reporting relating to payment activity which has enabled us to design tailored payment strategies and make the customer experience better.
How useful has our Account Updater Service been in maintaining up-to-date customer card information?
We have some customers on long-term payment plans so having the Account Updater service automatically update their information is great as it removes the need to re-engage the customer to update their card details. This allows us to concentrate on our non-engaging customers and make efficient use of our team’s time and it saves our customers time.
How have you found working with the Acquired.com team?
Our Account Manager, Kim, has been a great business partner. She is consistently providing advice on how to increase transaction success rate, recommending technological improvements, and advising us of new features which are available. Kim is always available for any technical issues which may crop up and understands the importance to our business of taking payments and providing a simple and reliable service to our customers.
A word from Acquired.com on Perch Group
Perch Group have been partnered with Acquired.com since 2019. We have supported their growth journey over the years and will continue to work closely with them as they acquire new books of loans. Acquired.com maintain an open communication and consultative approach with Perch to ensure we can provide resilience, efficient support, and suggestions about products and solutions to best suit their needs.
During this partnership Acquired.com have undertaken four token migrations from incumbent providers – supporting consumer loans books acquired by Perch Capital. Tailored account plans introduced in this year have further enabled us to understand their business in detail, in order to support them in the best possible way.
