osamet67

TrueAccord is hiring engineers (SF, Kansas City, San Jose, remote) and product - two PMs, one Director of Product, and VP of Product.

https://jobs.lever.co/trueaccord

Shameless plug: That's exactly why we started TrueAccord (www.trueaccord.com).

1. People in debt aren't "deadbeats" and deserve to be treated well 2. Using technology to make the process about financial health and treating people like regular customers makes a huge difference

Thanks for the mention, Bill! We're working hard to make a difference.

And that's why FDCPA litigation is decreasing and TCPA litigation is growing. Path of least resistance. Though, you have to admit, practices and law governing UDAAP isn't as clear as the FDCPA examples you bring here.

Thanks for the mention! I'm one of the cofounders. We're already making a huge difference in debt collection for several leading technology companies. We had to rethink a lot of the core solutions and technologies for debt collection to not fall into the same traps.

That's exactly why we started working on this problem.

What assumptions are you making regarding operating costs?

True. Actually, the majority of consumers that go through debt settlement end up bankrupt anyway. Some blame the fees, but I don't have data to substantiate that.

I think that happens because they are focused on one thing: trying to get money from people who don't have it. But what happens if they help people create money that will pay for the debt? That's one of the things we're trying to do.

Absolutely possible - just need to have the right mindset and tools. As someone who started a startup that's reinventing how debt collection gets done, I see a lot of old-school collectors who'd never be able to break the mold because their financial incentives aren't aligned. They don't have the technology, thus do not have the efficiency and margin, to operate ethically. They have to make money off of fees and interest so they end up focusing on people who can pay, making their lives harder, and having them end up in worse financial standing than if they chose not to pay.

Something's missing here - who actually paid the loan?

This. People don't understand the (bad) economics of current debt collection efforts.

Horrifying and accurate. The way people's lives are handed over to questionable businesses is nothing short of crazy.

Really interested in your feedback. Does this even solve a problem for you? Would you use it?

Sounds a lot like ownerlistens.com Same consumer facing SMS functionality (masks your number) or an app if you want to avoid fees Backend more fully featured + has an API and supports iBeacons

The law doesn't really set a high bar for debt validation, tbh. Good points here though. I hope to be able to solve them.

I don't get it - consumers pay you to send a cease and desist letter for them?

You may be interested in some of the points here: http://blog.signifyd.com/2013/02/25/detecting-fraud-in-digit...

My experience has been that experts in techniques get entrenched in techniques and have a hard time seeing beyond the numbers.

Interesting to see the responses about Facebook trustworthiness. Are there other payment companies out there that can compete?

I think people are over sensitive and act with a sense of entitlement. It showed me trending topics, I love data and patterns, it was a useful tool - and I'd love to see Twitter figure out its business model.

I actually liked it.

Facebook taught the world what's social networking - now it's time for interest groups and niche SNs. It's just natural progression.

Yes, but it's solving a different problem than the one we're solving.

Yeah, that's more of an internal community thing. What we're trying to do is create an abstraction layer above all taht, that will either be agnostic to or be able to understand these kind of trends. Semantic analysis of content, for example, is one rabbit hole we're not planning to venture into.

This is along the lines of what we're trying to do. Interesting ideas!