BY : JAYANTY NADA SHOFA, HERU ANDRIYANTO

NOVEMBER 18, 2019

Jakarta. A Singapore-based company has enjoyed being the sole player in the debt collection business that employs artificial intelligence in Indonesia, and perhaps also in Southeast Asia.

AsiaCollect arrived in Indonesia in November 2018 and has since attracted many big clients including the country’s top banks, its executive told the Jakarta Globe in a recent interview.

More and more Indonesian companies who do not have enough time and resources to deal with their non-performing loans have turned to AsiaCollect for help.

“We are providing a digitalized debt collection. There are so many fintech companies doing online lending: peer-to-peer, payday loan and many other types. They all want to lend, but most of them don’t know how to collect or get the money repaid. We’re helping them to do just that,” AsiaCollect’s country manager, Guillermo Martin, said.

The company uses artificial intelligence to get to know borrowers better and avoid using coercive means in collecting debts, he said.

The debt collection business in Indonesia has gained notoriety for employing threats and even humiliating the borrowers. Recent media reports said loan recipients in online lending schemes were often subjected to public humiliation when they failed to repay. Lenders could easily do this since they require loan recipients to provide their social media usernames and passwords before their loans were approved.

But Martin stressed his company would never do such things. “If others want to do it, that’s their choice. What we want to do is reputable and transparent debt collection. We want to help financial institutions recover their money, but to do it in a way that is not damaging to the customers and doesn’t have a negative impact on society,” he said. Continue reading here.