Interview: Kevin Keleghan, President and CEO of OSI

Q. How did you get into the accounts receivable management industry?

A. I entered a management-training program at GE Capital upon graduation from college. Since then, my career has been in financial services, mainly in the credit card call center and collections sectors. I have been on the client side for most of my career and that experience has lent itself well to my current position because my primary focus was to delight the customer and make sure the clients’ objectives were met.

Q. What attracted you to the top position at OSI?

A. One of the reasons I was attracted to OSI was due to OSI’s relationship with Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP). MDP has an outstanding reputation as one of the top private equity investment firms in the USA. I was very impressed with the entire team of partners.

A second reason is based upon my need for challenging work. I was attracted to the new challenge of financial restructuring, which initially was my top priority at OSI.

Q. OSI recently announced a major reorganization of the company. How will the reorganization impact the future of OSI?

A. The reorganization is part of our strategic plan that has been in play for several months. The changes were designed to drive consistency in how we go to market, how we talk to clients and how we perform.

When we hired Jeff Wahl in January, we knew he was the best candidate in the country to run all of our operations. Tim Bauer, who was recently hired to fill the new position of evp business development and portfolio acquisitions, is one of the top executives in the industry. Jeff as the leader of all operations and Tim as the leader of our consolidated sales function will work together to ensure that our new functional structure will deliver a consistent approach to the market that is closely aligned with operations, while continuing to be industry focused.

Our clients will benefit from our focus on operations excellence and strengthened performance results.