The difficulty of the collection industry to "go ashore"
China Newsweek reporter: Li Mingzi Halik
Published in the 2023th issue of China Newsweek magazine on August 8, 21
"Let the world have no irretrievable integrity" - in Changsha, Hunan Province, through the glass door, this slogan on the background wall of the front desk of Yongxiong Group headquarters is still clearly visible.
But the "integrity" of the entire collection industry is experiencing a new round of torture. "When violent collection is prevalent, it is difficult to make a living by doing it in a conventional way." After more than ten years in the industry, Li Feng has witnessed the collection industry from germination, outbreak to chaos. "Overdue debts are becoming more and more difficult to collect, anti-collection black production continues to break the bottom line, the supervision of collection is becoming stricter, and under the pressure of the three parties, the industry has reached a stage where it is not broken or established." During the epidemic, business volume declined, and Li Feng had to quit and change careers.
During the new crown epidemic, the collection industry has experienced another pain, and the domestic "collection giant" Yongxiong Group is no exception. "The number of employees dropped from 1,7 before the pandemic to 7000,2000 after the epidemic, and then sharply dropped to 2023,5 after the incident" "Group accounts and liquidity are frozen, making it difficult to sustain operations." In the early morning of May 25, <>, Yongxiong Group announced the closure of business on the official WeChat account, but the announcement was quickly withdrawn.
The closure of Yongxiong Group has once again sounded the alarm for the collection industry: the gray area of the industry is facing increasingly strict supervision, which has once again triggered huge social distrust.
"Recently, the closure of collection companies has aroused huge public attention in the society and pushed the collection industry to the public." On May 5, the day after Yongxiong's announcement, the NPL Clearance Committee of the China Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises quickly came forward and issued a "proposal", calling on law enforcement departments to "rationally and objectively view the collection industry, not only to crack down on violent collection and black sheep that encroach on citizens' information security, but also to protect collection companies operating legally and compliantly." ”
In fact, since the P2P explosion, the collection industry has faced a round of industry rectification, but it has been in an embarrassing situation. In the eyes of the outside world, the "bad" image of the collection industry is still difficult to reverse for a long time; For financial institutions, how to manage a large self-operated collection team and outsourcing agencies has always been a major problem.
"The embarrassing situation in the collection industry is partly related to the lack of industry standards." A senior practitioner in the field of lending said that the legislation of the collection industry is still in a blank area, and the lack of reference standards in the practical operation stage also allows criminals to "exploit loopholes", resulting in rampant anti-collection "gray production".
Where should China's collection industry go? "China's collection industry was born in 2003, and after 20 years of development, it has become an industry with thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of employees, recovering more than <> billion yuan of overdue and non-performing loans for financial institutions every year." The aforementioned "Proposal" calls on relevant departments to carry out legislation on the collection industry.
"Collection giant" under rectification
"Yongxiong's investigation has aroused the attention of the whole society to the collection industry." This is the unanimous feeling of people in the industry.
In May this year, Yongxiong mentioned in the "Notice to All Employees" released on its official account that on April 5, April 2023 and May 4, 3, the Anhui police cross-province law enforcement, successively intervened in the investigation of the Jishou Branch, the Huaihua Branch, the Xiangtan Branch and the Shaoyang Branch of the Group Weicheng Company, forcibly took a total of 4 employees to Anhui, and took criminal compulsory measures such as residential surveillance, release on bail pending trial, criminal detention, and arrest. At present, a total of 10 employees have been arrested on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
Subsequently, Yongxiong Group issued a statement on the revocation of the "Notice to All Employees". By the afternoon of May 5, both posts appeared to have been deleted by their publishers.
"In the suspension of business for rectification, other inconvenient disclosure." China Newsweek contacted a middle-level Yongxiong manager in the name of consulting collection business, who said: "The company has requirements for resuming business around October, and now it is closely watched by all parties, and it is difficult to talk about other situations." ”
The headquarters of Yongxiong Group, located in Changsha's Lugu Xincheng Science and Technology Park, refused visitors, and the company's security said that it was not recruiting at present, no new business was accepted, employees were on holiday, and outsiders were prohibited from entering the office building.
However, a media account that collects local recruitment information in Changsha released Yongxiong's recruitment information on July 7. Recruitment of risk control specialist, monthly salary of 8~4000 yuan, the work content is mainly responsible for credit card overdue account management. Job requirements, experience in credit card and personal consumption contribution collection is preferred.
The reporter saw outside the company building that the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second and fifth floors were blocked by white roller blinds, and the white curtains of some panes were printed with the four big characters of "Yongxiong Group", and the curtains on the third and fourth floors had been closed. The property staff of the park said that the business department of Yongxiong headquarters did not go to work, and there were still people in the administrative, logistics and other departments.
According to Yongxiong's official website, the group is a domestic personal credit non-performing asset management group company, founded in April 2014, the group is headquartered in Changsha, Hunan Province, with branches in more than 4 cities across the country, and has developed in many fields such as credit card and consumer finance such as personal credit non-performing asset management, science and technology research and development.
Before the investigation, Hunan Yongxiong claimed to be the largest collection company in the country, and in 2019, it tried to go public in the United States to impact the "collection of the first share", but was unsuccessful.
The prospectus disclosed that as of June 2019, 6, Wing Hsiung had a market share of 30.16%, twice as much as the second place. There are 6,29 full-time collectors in the operation centers in 10915 cities in China, accounting for 95.0% of its employees, and there are also 1109,<> collection experts with many years of collection experience and qualified to negotiate directly with debtors. Yongxiong Group has established long-term cooperation and business relationships with seven of China's top ten commercial banks, and has also provided services to some large Internet consumer finance companies.
Traditional collection mainly relies on "human sea tactics", and Yongxiong's method is to open a large number of branches in cities with low labor costs. Industrial and commercial information shows that from 2014 to 2019, Yongxiong Group opened 40 branches across the country, and 2018 branches in 25 alone. Only 16 are currently in existence.
In 2015, Yongxiong established a group company, followed by the establishment of three wholly-owned subsidiaries, Weicheng, Weixiong and Weixin. At present, the legal person of Yongxiong Group has been replaced by Zhou Xiaofang, the wife of founder Tan Man, but Hunan Weicheng Credit Risk Management Co., Ltd. is still operated by Tan Man, which moved from Changsha to Tan Man's hometown, Xinhua County, Loudi, Hunan in 2017.
China Newsweek saw in Xinhua that Weicheng's headquarters was only across the road from the Xinhua County People's Court. The company's outdoor advertising advertisement said that Weicheng company headquarters is a key investment promotion project and people-benefiting project attached great importance to by the Xinhua County Party Committee and the county government, which is personally led by the secretary of the Xinhua County Party Committee and the county mayor, and enjoys supporting high-quality services and encouraging policies in accordance with laws and regulations, providing a new strong impetus for the cause of Xinhua poverty alleviation.
Weicheng Company had informed employees to resume work on June 6, and those who did not show up would be regarded as resignation, and employees who arrived were also required to resign on the same day. Because the compensation issue was not negotiated, on the evening of June 12, a large number of employees gathered at the company's Loudi branch to ask for explanations. At present, the company has gone to the empty building, there are a large number of couriers stacked at the door of the mailroom, and the security guard of Xinhua Weicheng Company said that the company is currently in a state of closure.
"Yongxiong has its own problems, and the specific situation will have to wait for the official investigation results." According to an industry insider, the China Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Non-performing Assets Collection Professional Committee is the only legally registered and established self-regulatory organization in the collection industry in China, which is guided by the National Development and Reform Commission and supervised by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and Yongxiong Group has never been a member.
The black cat complaint platform is full of hundreds of complaints against "Hunan Yongxiong", including phone bombing, harassment of colleagues, soft violence collection of debtors' families, and other issues.
Regarding the reason for the investigation of Yongxiong Group, The Paper previously reported that a number of former employees of Hunan Yongxiong said that Anhui police cross-province law enforcement was because an employee of a newly established branch invaded a government information website in Anhui Province and collected a large amount of information through crawler software. During the investigation of another branch, the Anhui police found that a collector pretending to be a public prosecutor and legal officer was collecting money.
The reporter called the Anhui police to inquire about the progress of the case, and the other party said that the news released by the handling agency would prevail after the case was closed.
"Yongxiong does not represent China's collection industry. The normal collection business in the industry is continuing. However, the above-mentioned insiders in the industry also admitted that Yongxiong's accident caused trouble to the industry to recruit new people, "Many young people come to apply, see that it is to do collection, suspect that it is irregular work, or their families are opposed, and leave." ”
Normal collection was still affected. He complained, "Some unreasonable debtors, encouraged by anti-collection, think that Yongxiong has an accident, and they can be more justified in not paying back." ”
"Using violence to increase returns"
In the collection circle, Yongxiong is known for "gnawing hard bones". Its collection business is generally overdue for more than a year, and even has gone through several rounds of package sales in the market, so the company's profit distribution is also the highest.
A senior practitioner in the field of lending told China Newsweek that the post-loan collection work of financial institutions is divided into two links: internal urging and outsourcing. Typically, short-aged assets within three months (M3) are handled in-house, while loans older than three months are distributed to third-party collection agencies.
"Overdue customers above M3 have basically experienced several rounds of internal collection, either insufficient repayment ability, or weak willingness to repay, low collection rate, unable to cover the high cost of internal collection, which is also the space for a large number of collection companies." The above-mentioned senior practitioners in the field of lending explained.
Li Feng told China Newsweek that the proportion of profits distributed by collection companies depends on the degree of overdue, the number of debtors, the amount of personal debts, etc., and the distribution is usually about 30%. Some debts that are overdue for several years, financial institutions will directly package and resell the debt to the collection company, and the collection money is profitable after deducting the purchase cost, and if you are lucky, you can get back the money by urging it into a large order.
According to the prospectus of Yongxiong Group when it planned to list in the United States in 2019, its commission rate was above 35.3%. However, the listing plan did not succeed.
"We do not accept businesses whose total amount is too small, and the total amount of each business of Yongxiong is measured in 40 million yuan." The above-mentioned middle management of Yongxiong said that if the legal debts of other listed institutions of non-bank credit cards are overdue for more than one year and the total amount is in the millions, the dividend accounts for at least 50% or even <>% of the amount of the collection. "But now public opinion does not encourage collection, and it is being closely watched, and it is difficult to open three and seven."
How profitable is Yongxiong? On January 1 this year, Tan Man, founder and president of Yongxiong Group, revealed at the 14 annual summary and commendation meeting that Yongxiong Group will provide tens of thousands of jobs in 2022, contribute more than 2022 million yuan in tax revenue, and achieve revenue of more than 1 million yuan. In 5, Yongxiong Group will strive to achieve annual task goals such as stable personnel scale of more than 8,2023 people, annual revenue of more than 1 billion yuan, annual tax payment of more than 10 million yuan, and more than 1 new customer units.
"Personal debt collection is to use anti-aircraft guns to fight mosquitoes, only by relying on intensive labor, can achieve economies of scale, banks, online loan companies, law firms can not cover this labor cost, can only be entrusted to a third party." Lin Zhou, head of a corporate credit management consulting firm, said the industry calls employees of companies like Yongxiong "collection dogs."
In Yongxiong's system, how much does an individual collector get? According to the official micro of Yongxiong Group, the monthly salary of its collectors is 2500,3050 yuan, and the Changsha area is 3,8 yuan, and the income mainly depends on commissions, and the higher the amount of collection, the higher the commission ratio. Some employees said that they can get <>% commission if they collect more than <>,<> yuan.
在催收行业，催收公司员工工资多以底薪＋高额佣金提成的方式发放。这种收入结构，也在变相刺激催收行为越界。业绩考核的压力，层层传递到每一位员工身上。
为了实现高催回率，暴力催收、违法催收，成为行业潜规则。“佣金率高的话，必然会用暴力方式来提高回款。”多名永雄前员工在接受媒体采访时称，“如果完全合规，是回不了款的。”
“什么样的年轻人会甘愿做这样的工作？好管理吗？永雄出事早在业内意料之中。”林洲坦言。
在中国裁判文书网上，以“催收、侵犯公民个人信息”为关键词，能搜索出多起与永雄相关的案件。2017年，广州市天河区人民检察院指控宁某某等4人犯侵犯公民个人信息罪，使用微信、QQ等社交软件，通过向上家购买、交换等方式，非法获取公民个人信息并出售。此外，宁某某获取信息的途径还包括“所在公司部分工作微信群”，宁某某任职湖南永雄资产管理集团公司从事信用卡催收业务。
还有媒体报道，2020年9月，贵州贞丰县法院一起涉及2万条公民信息买卖案中，永雄温州分公司员工万某为催讨债务，将21774条含有公民身份证和姓名的公民信息提供给兰某，兰某再从运营商员工刘某处购买这些身份名下的手机号码。每卖出一条手机号码，刘某可以收益1.5元到2元。
合规问题一直深度困扰着永雄。2022年，永雄启动国内主板上市计划，企业合规被一再提上日程。“我们只接合法持牌金融机构的大单，高利贷等非法债务肯定是不受理的。”上述永雄中层管理人员强调，“公司严格合规，也会培训员工如何规范催收。”
永雄在《告全体员工书》中也强调，“永雄集团绝对不存在公司违法犯罪行为”“个别员工的违规违法问题仅仅是个人的问题，绝不是有组织的集团行为。”
“这类合规行为的本质是在公司与员工之间设立隔离带。” 长沙一家从事催收相关行业的企业负责人说，一旦员工违法违规，纯属个人行为，“因为公司已经做过相关培训了。”
多家公司相继出事
在永雄之前，自称“处于金融服务商(核心委外机构)营业额业内全国第二名”的湖南强贲早已被查。
2021年11月30日，警方在湖南长沙某写字楼内当场抓获该公司177名涉案人员，扣押作案用服务器3台，扣押、冻结涉案资金500余万元。
《中国新闻周刊》记者来到湖南强贲位于天心区蓝湾国际广场A座的办公区发现，楼层照明被损坏，公司大门紧锁，内部公共区全部清空，仅剩墙上张贴的几张“强贲信用”字样的告示板，显示这里曾是催收公司。
“合规催收禁令通知”告示上，还强调了“八项催收禁令”，包括“严禁冒充公检法”“严禁暴力催收”“严禁泄露、买卖客户信息”等内容。
“催收禁令”，如今成了这家公司最讽刺的一幕。
警方调查显示，湖南强贲主要承接银行、信贷等金融机构不良资产管理及信用卡催收业务服务。为提高催收成功率、提升业绩，湖南强贲公司将催收对象还款金额直接与业务部绩效收入挂钩，在银行提供的个人信息无法联系或者催收对象还款意愿不强的情况下，组织公司人员就通过网络黑灰产渠道大量购买公民个人信息，再将这些公民个人信息贩卖给公司员工用于催收。
湖南强贲还巧立名目，以“水果费”“风险费”等名义，每月从员工工资中扣除几百到数十元不等的费用，作为购买公民个人信息的资金。通过专案组初步调查，该公司月均购买公民信息10万余条，累计非法获取公民信息达200余万条。
According to the data, Hunan Qiangben Company was established in 2014, has branches in Hangzhou, Changchun, Xi'an, Huangshi, Zhengzhou, Wuhan and Shenzhen, and has cooperated with WeBank, Bank of Communications, Postal Savings Bank, China CITIC Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and other banks, and Hunan Qiangben also won the title of "Six-star Excellent Entrusting Organization" in the first quarter of 2021 by China CITIC Bank.
Does the financial institution of the entrusting party need to be liable for illegal collection? It is understood that when some financial institutions cooperate with outsourcing collection companies, they will require outsourcing collection companies to carry out collection business in accordance with the code of conduct provided to ensure legal and compliant collection. For example, some banks will require collection companies to collect at the premises provided by the bank, or to operate in the city where the bank is located, and the bank will send a supervisor to the door. Some banks require collectors to use the bank's internal system, and collectors need to collect according to the prescribed words, and the whole process will be recorded.
However, this kind of full-process supervision is only very rare, and many "overdue projects" have been subcontracted layer by layer, and penetrating supervision is simply unrealistic. Many financial institutions will package and sell non-performing assets to asset management companies, and asset management companies may also sell them to downstream institutions, and these collection companies will buy relevant asset packages and then collect the assets in them.
In most cases, financial institutions cannot avoid the use of aggressive behavior by outsourcing agencies in order to achieve collection success rates.
On the other hand, financial black industries such as the "anti-collection alliance" have also created greater trouble for collection in recent years. "Anti-collection is becoming more rampant, and the longer personal debts are overdue, the harder it is to collect." Lin Zhou analyzed that in order to survive, collection companies can only continue to increase pressure, and in the case of unclear legal definitions of collection behavior, most companies will inevitably go to the road of illegality.
In fact, since March this year, in addition to Yongxiong, a number of other Hunan collection companies have been enforced by Anhui police across provinces. According to Southern Weekend reports, on March 3, Hunan Zhongcheng Non-performing Assets Disposal Co., Ltd., Hunan Huawei Jinan Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., and Hunan Chengpu Legal Consulting Co., Ltd. were investigated.
Hunan Chengpu is located on the second floor of a building on the northwest side of the headquarters of Yongxiong Group, with a straight-line distance of less than 50 meters. At present, the company's glass doors are closed, the office area is clean and tidy, and the workstation is neat. Building property personnel recalled that more than <> people from the company were taken away that day.
Less than 5 kilometers away, the 19th floor of an office building in Lugu Enterprise Plaza is the office location of Hua Wei Jin'an, Hunan Province. The gates were also closed, as the evacuation was hasty and several pamphlets were scattered on the ground. Hunan Zhongcheng, on the 18th floor of a chain hotel, has a glass door locked from the inside in the main office area, computers, printers and personal belongings left on the workstation, and a camp bed in the office on the side of the office area, but no one answers. Several other co-working offices have been vacated, and property personnel are organizing renovations to be subleased out.
Industry needs "systemic change"
"The market has picked up, but the economy is still sluggish, and the collection business has increased significantly." In the first half of this year, Lin Zhou traveled almost continuously and engaged in enterprise collection work for more than 20 years, and he has never been as busy as this year.
The latest China Financial Stability Report 2022 shows that non-performing loans have increased, and there is greater pressure on asset quality to decline. As of the end of 2021, the balance of non-performing loans of banking financial institutions was 3.63 trillion yuan, an increase of 1534.1 billion yuan year-on-year, and the non-performing loan ratio was 80.0%, down 12.90 percentage points year-on-year. However, the balance of loans overdue for more than 2 days reached 84.1945 trillion yuan, an increase of 7.36 billion yuan or <>.<>% year-on-year.
The significant increase in overdue loans over three months has given the collection industry a potentially significant amount of business space.
Before the epidemic, the collection industry had also been in a period of rapid outbreak. According to iResearch, China's collection industry is highly fragmented and highly competitive, consisting of about 3000,2013 companies and institutions, with market participants including domestic law firms, small collection agencies and large privately owned consumer receivables management companies, according to iResearch. From 2017 to 48, the total revenue of the Chinese collection market grew at a CAGR of 5.2%, compared to a CAGR of 9.<>% in the US market during the same period.
In the era of barbaric growth, extreme cases caused by violent and soft violent collection occur from time to time, stinging social nerves. On November 2021, 11, the Personal Information Protection Law came into force. In 1, the Ministry of Public Security and nine other departments included soft violence collection, loss of contact, repair, and theft of private information as regular anti-gang crime and evil eradication actions. "The field of post-loan collection of personal loans has encountered the most complete, strictest and strongest supervision in history." Lin Zhou commented, "Relevant systems have been introduced one after another, and the era of barbaric growth of collecting profits by illegal means has basically ended." ”
But the compliance problem has not really been solved, which has always been a problem for the collection industry.
"The frequent infringement of citizens' personal information in the industry not only causes the public to question and lack confidence in the collection industry, but even denies the entire industry due to the illegal and criminal collection of individual collection agencies and personnel." On December 2022, 12, at the sub-forum of the 10th "Credit Rule of Law Shaoshan Forum" held in the Yongxiong Building of Xiangtan University, some experts summarized that this led to the collection industry struggling to survive in the gap between supervision and public opinion.
In the environment of imperfect credit, the collection industry itself is also facing many problems. For example, many debtors with a long overdue time frequently change their contact information to avoid debts, resulting in collection services such as reminders for repayment by creditors and their outsourced collection agencies unable to be carried out normally. In this case, collectors have to spend a lot of time and energy on information repair, requesting third-party assistance in collection, and requesting third-party compensation. During this period, irregular collection behavior occurred from time to time.
Some collection agencies and collection personnel adopt excessive methods or tough measures to exert pressure, and even some collection personnel take risks to collect violations of laws and regulations, such as obtaining the personal information of the debtor through illegal or improper means, impersonating public officials such as public security law to collect collection, underworld soft violence collection, and telephone bombing with "call to death" software.
"The traditional phone collection model is now facing the dual challenges of compliance and declining revenue." Relevant industry experts pointed out at the above forum that exploring a new balance and eliminating the criminal risks caused by the repair of missing information in the collection process has become an urgent issue that the collection industry needs to solve urgently.
In Hunan, some financial institutions and collection agencies are working with communication operators to promote the "three networks repair and loss of connection" model to break the situation. The specific operation mode is that the three major communication operators of Mobile, Unicom and Telecom rely on their own massive data, and under the premise of ensuring data privacy and security, discover the currently active mobile phone number of the missing person by encrypting the ID number, and then provide missing user contact services for banks, outsourced collection agencies, insurance, courts, governments and other units through virtual outbound calls.
The industry insider told China Newsweek that regulating collection behavior needs to rely on stronger regulatory forces. For example, he introduced that for example, the member units of the non-performing assets collection professional committee basically only accept the post-loan business of the bank, the office site is monitored in an all-round way, and the communication equipment used for work is recorded 72 hours a day, which is supervised by the bank, and will lose the bank's major customers once it defaults.
Under the pressure of regulatory compliance, the post-loan management industry chain has been continuously upgraded, and "technology" is also one of the paths for collection and upgrading.
New technologies represented by AI are gradually entering the collection industry. For example, some AI companies can establish corresponding collection measures for different types of overdue customers according to the collection needs of financial institutions, which is more conducive to monitoring and standardization, is more transparent and easier to review than traditional collection, and is also favored by some institutions. According to the Securities Times, at present, China Recruitment Finance, China Post Consumer Finance, and Immediate Consumer Finance all use collection robots.
As the source of the industrial chain, financial institutions must also make changes. "If the financial institutions that are the source of the industrial chain do not strictly approve loans in the lending process, relax the approval standards, or try to make up for the cost of debt scrapping by raising interest rates, there will inevitably be default overdue, and there will inevitably be untrustworthiness, and it is almost impossible for these debt evaders to collect through conventional collection methods, and it is difficult to ensure that new suspected violations will not appear." Lin Zhou pointed out.
The "national standard" of the collection industry is also worth looking forward to for the industry. In May this year, the Internet Finance Association of China held a working meeting in Beijing on "the development of national standards for collection and the healthy development of collection business norms", and planned to introduce a standard plan and control measures for post-loan collection, namely the "Internet Finance Personal Online Consumer Credit Post-loan Collection Risk Control Guidelines" (hereinafter referred to as "collection standards"). There is news that it will be released in the third quarter of this year at the earliest.
The "Collection Standards" point out that financial institutions should clarify the selection criteria and access procedures for third-party collection agencies, implement list system management, and "designate a senior manager to be responsible for managing collection work".
The standard also strictly defines the collection object and collection time. For example, financial institutions and third-party collection agencies should collect collection from the debtor and its guarantors and jointly and severally liable persons (hereinafter referred to as "relevant parties"), and should not collect collection from unrelated third parties. If the contractual agreement between the financial institution and the debtor does not specify the time and frequency of collection, the collection operation shall be carried out at an appropriate time, and shall not be collected from 22:00 to 8:00 the next day. In terms of collection methods, they should not conceal their identities, pretend to be party and government organs, enterprises and institutions and other organizations or institutions, or carry out collection in the name of individuals.
"After the unification of industry standards, it can also curb anti-collection black production to a certain extent." The above-mentioned senior practitioners in the field of lending said that in the past, the collection industry wanted to self-regulate and had no reference standards, and it was difficult to grasp the collection scale, which made the anti-collection black production loophole. "Standards are better than none, but the key depends on whether they can be implemented properly."
(At the request of interviewees, Lin Zhou and Li Feng are pseudonyms in the text)
China Newsweek, Issue 2023, 31
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