Posted by Mary Wisniewski, Collection Technology.net

Following constant change is no easy gig. And for the collections world, keeping up with bankruptcy updates is one particularly harsh headache, as events within a filing are fluid. Or to put it another way, the time requirement to comb through ever-changing court papers can be a beast.

LexisNexis wants to remove this collection research task through a newer offering, LexisNexis Banko Events Monitoring. In short, the product lets subscribers receive automated updates of events within a bankruptcy filing.

The product “stems from the whole fact that bankruptcy has caught people by surprise,” Rob Fite, vice president of collection solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, says. “Reform was supposed to [slow] some of the bankruptcy filings.”

But it hasn’t. And Lexis believes that 2010 will continue to witness a slew of bankruptcies, and for collectors, the challenge is monitoring the changes within a bankruptcy. The new Lexis product aims to help, by offering to follow more than 500 events between opening and closing a bankruptcy.

“There are hundreds of things that happen between opening and closing [a bankruptcy],” says Linda Straub Jones, collections solutions product consultant at Lexis.

Creditors must react to some of these updates, she explains. Consider a motion to redeem, which helps debtors keep secured property. If a debtor has a $10,000 balance on an auto loan, he or she could file a motion to redeem, perhaps requesting to pay only half of the loan to keep the car and call it a day. However, Straub Jones says some debtors are taking advantage of this motion, and offering maybe only a $100 for the car, as an extreme example.

“It’s one of those in between things that a creditor needs to know immediately,” she says.

A user can choose how many bankruptcy events, and what events, he or she wants Lexis to monitor. In turn, Lexis will send its findings back to the user as fast as 24 hours, or batch it back weekly, or monthly, depending on the user’s preference.

The product launched in mid-January and has a “number” of early adopters, says Fite.

What’s next from Lexis? Launching within 60 days is a skip wizard, which will perform skips for users.

View Mary Wisniewski’s original posting at CollectionTechnology.net.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Receivables Management Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.