With the first quarter of 2025 behind us, I want to provide an update on our key focus areas and what we’ve learned this year. I will focus on three key topics:
How Agent Assist Essentials is supporting dispute agents
Insights on the regulatory environment
Lessons from ongoing AI development
If you are interested in reading last quarter’s update, check it out here.
How Agent Assist Essentials is Supporting Dispute Agents
We’re excited about the feedback we’ve received on our Data Quality Scanner (DQS) Disputes Module. This feedback helped us launch our Agent Assist Essentials offering (see the press release for more details).
For background, the DQS Disputes Module is mainly designed for managers and QA personnel to monitor data quality in credit disputes operations. It provides crucial insights that help update procedures and training for their teams.
However, we learned from QA and managers that the ability to view all furnishing and dispute history for an account and customer in one place, along with insights from our data quality rules, would also benefit their agents.
In response, we created Agent Assist Essentials to make all those historical insights easily available and deployed it for use by our existing DQS Disputes clients. This interim solution will directly benefit our clients and their agents. We are also progressing on our prototype for the real-time, AI-assisted Agent Assist Advantage product, which we expect to release later this year.
Thank you very much to our clients for their feedback and our team for quickly developing these impressive innovations.
Insights on the Regulatory Environment
There has already been considerable discussion about the uncertain and changing regulatory environment, so I will only share a few points that I find most relevant regarding FCRA compliance.
Many know the CFPB has dropped several lawsuits and scaled back certain enforcement actions. There is still considerable uncertainty about ongoing enforcement activities.
However, clients have reported that, after a brief pause, they are receiving notices of CFPB supervision activities related to FCRA matters. This suggests that, while the CFPB may be reducing specific enforcement actions, it continues to concentrate on FCRA issues overall. They have also continued to update the CFPB complaint database after a brief pause.
We’ve also heard multiple people point out that lookbacks from the next administration could require data spanning several years, underscoring the importance of ensuring data quality.
While examining data quality last year, we had the opportunity to compare our Data Quality Scanner’s results with those from a regulator’s tool, and the results were interesting. See the Regulator Case Study for more details. We were pleased to see that our tool was more nuanced and therefore invaluable for our clients in maintaining FCRA compliance.
Lastly, the private right to pursue legal action remains strong, with increasing lawsuits related to the FCRA. There is also the potential for State Attorneys General to enforce FCRA. Maintaining high data quality is essential to protect your organization from these rising costs.
Lessons From Continued AI Development
For our latest efforts in AI, we are focusing on several key areas:
- Incorporating Human Procedures: We are using procedures originally designed for human colleagues to inform AI actions.
- Optimizing Agent Hierarchy: We are developing the right agent hierarchy to enhance accuracy and efficiency.
- Experimenting with LLMs: We’re testing various large language models to address specific use cases, aiming for optimal accuracy and efficiency.
Our preliminary results look promising, and we plan to conduct extensive testing before making these developments widely available. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out and we can show you the latest from the prototype as it evolves!
Thank you to our colleagues, clients, and partners for your continued support!
