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 67% ACH success and a 29.6% 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 24 retry attempts were made against 1,566 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 with no processor economics in the outcome, 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, 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 R08 recovery: Debit-card fallback was positioned after the right number of ACH failures, with R08 (stop-payment) volume routed to card recovery.
• Collections-exit discipline: Clear hand-off rules let genuinely uncollectible accounts exit promptly while recoverable ones stay in the waterfall.

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 $8.9M in identified annual opportunity, split between ACH optimization and dual-authorization (card) recovery:

Of the total, roughly $5.4M came from ACH optimization (better success rates, smarter re-presentment) and $3.5M from dual-authorization recovery (routing the right failures to card). The largest single line was the distressed brand at $4.0M, where the gap between current and achievable performance was widest.

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.

‍