The Department That Time Forgot
If you ask Stephanie Walker, Chief Operations Officer at Georgia United Credit Union, what frustrates her most about traditional collections, she doesn’t hesitate.
“It is an area that is a ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ area, and it’s hard to get out of that. In general, we operate how we did 20 years ago, maybe with some system changes.”
– Stephanie Walker, COO, Georgia United Credit Union
It’s a sentiment that resonates across the industry. Despite significant investment in loan origination technology, digital banking platforms, and member-facing tools, collections have largely been left behind. The tools exist, the loan volumes have grown, but the headcount and the operating model have not kept pace.
At Georgia United, a $2.5 billion credit union, the collections team runs lean. When loan volume grows, there isn’t always a corresponding increase in collectors. The result? A growing list of accounts that simply can’t be reached, and a team spending too much time on activity that doesn’t produce meaningful outcomes.
The Dead Air Problem
Tenisha Howard, Manager of Collections at Center Parc Credit Union, puts a name to the core inefficiency: dead air.
“We want the collectors to be empowered to make decisions for our members’ financial freedom. Unfortunately, that human capacity is being spent on dialing numbers, searching for people, and leaving voicemails.”
– Tenisha Howard, Manager of Collections, Center Parc Credit Union
Think about what a collector actually does in a given day. They dial. They wait. They get voicemail. They hang up and dial again. Industry estimates suggest collectors spend more than half their time on non-productive outreach. They’re not having complex conversations with members who need help. They’re running a manual phone tree.
And the irony is significant: these are skilled professionals. In credit unions especially, collectors are expected to manage bankruptcies, repossessions, credit reporting, payment arrangements, and sensitive member conversations. When their time is consumed by dialing, that expertise goes unused. Worse, as Tenisha explains, when skills aren’t exercised regularly, they can atrophy.
Why the Old Tech Fixes Don’t Work
Credit unions have tried to solve this problem before. Auto dialers, text reminders, predictive dialers, email campaigns. Each has helped at the margins, but none has moved the needle in a fundamental way.
Vanity Tulloch, Director of Lending Operations at Georgia United, explains why:
“Auto dialers and text reminders are just communication channels. They’re not decision-making tools. They can execute rule-based logic, but they can’t decide who to contact, when to contact them, what to say, and, most importantly, what to do next based on a response.”
– Vanity Tulloch, Director of Lending Operations, Georgia United Credit Union
A text reminder that says “Your payment is due” doesn’t adapt if the member texts back “I just lost my job.” An auto dialer can’t negotiate a payment arrangement, note a promise to pay, or recognize when a call should be escalated to a human agent. They are one-way broadcasting tools in a world that requires two-way conversation.
Real collections require listening, adapting, and responding with empathy and accuracy. That’s exactly what the old-guard technology cannot do.
Why AI Fits Collections So Well
When Stephanie was building the internal business case for AI at Georgia United, she started from a simple premise: they had a category of accounts they simply weren’t contacting at all. Negative share balances, specifically, were going unreached.
“It’s something we’re not doing, it’s something we can try, and it’s relatively low risk. If it goes poorly, at worst, we reached out to the member, which is what we aren’t able to do right now.”
– Stephanie Walker, COO, Georgia United Credit Union
From there, the fit becomes clear. AI collections agents address each of the structural problems with traditional collections:
- Scale without staffing: An AI agent can work a queue of 1,000 accounts or 100 accounts with equal consistency. When staff call in sick or volumes spike, the calls still get made.
- Consistency and compliance: Unlike human agents who may be having a good or a bad day, an AI agent follows the same script, the same compliance guardrails, and the same verification steps on every single call.
- Meaningful escalations: When a member genuinely wants to speak to a human, the AI recognizes it and hands it off, which means the collector gets calls they know will be productive.
- Earlier intervention: AI can start outreach at day two of delinquency rather than waiting until staff bandwidth allows, which meaningfully improves self-cure rates.
Stephanie summarizes it plainly: the AI doesn’t solve one problem. It solves all of the problems they named as issues with the traditional model.
Ready to See What AI Can Do For Your Credit Union?
Learn more here.
In Part 2, we’ll pull back the curtain on what it actually looks and sounds like to deploy AI in collections, how members and staff have responded, and the results these credit unions have seen in practice.