Katie May Soon be Multilingual

The animated collector introduced recently may soon have sister versions speaking in several languages, according to the president of the Towson, Md.-based collection agency that launched the program.

Access Receivables Management last month launched “Katie,” an animated online collector that can communicate with debtors that visit the firm’s Web site. Katie can take a nominal payment or a payment for balance in full, check the debtor’s resources, create a payment plan, and discuss loan sources, says Tom Gillespie, president of Access Receivables. The Katie program, also known as VirtualAccess, can accept credit card and ACH payments.

“She acts just like normal collector,” said Gillespie.

Gillespie said plans call for offering a Spanish-speaking Katie by Thanksgiving, and adding another five languages by the first quarter of 2008. Plans call fore adding more languages through the end of next year.  

Gillespie says the animated collector has doubled response rates and that the average payment size has increased.

The company created Virtual Access with InterProse Corp. of Vancouver, Wa. and began last week to offer licensing of the program to other collection agencies and to firms in other industries, said Gillespie. "This can handle customer service, ACH and credit card payments, sales applications and collections applications," says Gillespie.