$104.5M
ANNUAL ACH VOLUME
$8.0M
IDENTIFIED OPPORTUNITY
Client profile
A multi-state, state-licensed consumer installment lender operating four distinct lending brands across installment and line-of-credit products, sold online and through partners. The client processes the substantial majority of borrower repayments via ACH, with card as a secondary rail. The client is not named in this case study. The client is not named in this case study.
The Challenge
On paper, the portfolio looked healthy. Underneath, payment performance varied dramatically from brand to brand, and nobody had ever looked at it that way. The brands were managed as one book, with a single repayment approach applied across very different borrower populations.
A transaction-level review surfaced the real picture:
- One brand was in distress with a 60% ACH success and a 30% first-payment-default rate, roughly double an acceptable threshold and bleeding recoverable revenue every cycle.
- A second brand's re-presentment logic was effectively broken. Only a few retry attempts were made against thousands of failed payments, leaving recoverable dollars on the table by default.
- A third, highest-volume brand was solid but not optimized. Small percentage gains there represented the single largest dollar opportunity in the book.
- There was no brand-level waterfall strategy. Retry timing, attempt limits, card fallback, and collections-exit rules were undifferentiated, so strong and weak brands were treated identically.
The IPG Approach
As a vendor-neutral advisor, IPG worked from the client's own transaction data rather than a vendor's pitch. The engagement resegmented the entire book by brand and product and response code, then built a tailored recovery strategy for each.
Brand-level waterfall design
- Strategy per brand: Aggressive, standard, volume-optimized, or cost-conscious, the strategy matched to each brand's success, default, and ticket profile.
- Tuned retry mechanics: Maximum ACH attempts, re-presentment timing windows, and chronic-failure thresholds were set brand by brand.
- Card fallback and Rcode recovery: Debit-card fallback was positioned after the right number of ACH failures, with Rcode directions and timing routed to card recovery.
- Collections-exit discipline: Clear hand-off rules let genuinely uncollectible accounts exit promptly while recoverable ones stay in the waterfall. Collections strategy then implemented.
Every parameter was tied to a measured behavior in the data, and the full model was delivered as brand-segmented dashboards the client's team could run and monitor independently.
The Results
Segmenting the book and modeling a tuned waterfall against each brand's actual performance surfaced $8.0M in identified annual opportunity, split between ACH optimization and dual-authorization (card) recovery. Of the total, roughly $5M came from ACH optimization (better success rates, smarter re-presentment) and $3M from dual-authorization recovery (routing the right strategy on failures).
“We thought we had a healthy book. IPG showed us we had four very different books, and millions in recovery we were leaving on the table every year because we were running one playbook for all of them.”
— Representative client perspective · Consumer Installment Lender
Why It Mattered
IPG advocates for the lender, so the recommendation followed the data, not a vendor relationship. The client walked away with a brand-by-brand recovery roadmap, the dashboards to run it, and a quantified, auditable target, turning payment performance from an invisible cost into a managed source of recovered revenue.
