After a warm welcome and some time spent introducing different members of the team and those attending, the workshop moved into industry updates.
Muhammed Laher gave updates from CIF, comments about the current matter at court between the NCR and PDAs as well as the interesting ‘Scott’ matter (about induplum and debt review).
Next, there was some information about the ABSA debt review portal.
The portal is available to Debt Counsellors (with more being added over time). It gives access to a wide range of functions and information.
For example: Download your full DC book or process debit order cancellations.
At the moment, ABSA also integrate with Finwise, are busy testing integration with Bitech and are discussing integration with Intuitive. This means information can safely be sent, quickly between DCs and the Bank.
Then the discussion shifted to going through the different steps (and ABSA teams) in the process, such as COBs (the documents team), proposals (and a discussion about credit life insurance), counter proposals (and value added products), legal and terminations.
An interesting point which was made was that Debt Counsellors who do not make use of DCRS should not expect ABSA to make similar concessions on pro rata proposals. They deal with them very differently.
After talking about terminations and 17.3s the discussion wrapped up with ABSA sharing their contact and escalation details and a Question and Answer session.