Co-founder Tiffany Kaminski shares the personal experiences that inspired a better approach to collections
My name is Tiffany Kaminski, I am one of the cofounders and the Chief Marketing and Partnership Officer at Symend. When we started Symend about 8 years ago now, myself and my cofounder Haneef, we really approached the problem from a personal perspective. We were the at risk consumers ourselves.
I know Haneef's things back to coming over as a refugee from Iran and his family experiencing those collection calls and what a negative experience it was and how much stress it caused his family. If I think back to my first student loans as you move around, how easy it was to fall through the cracks and the long term impact that that had when you want to buy a house or a car or finance a business.
Certainly looking and reflecting on that, financial literacy in schools just really isn't where it should be today. And I think that as we sat back almost a decade ago now and we looked at this problem that we were both so personally impacted by, it remained very unchanged. So we really approached it as being those at risk consumers and wishing there was a better way, a more positive way that consumers can be empowered to resolve and overcome these often negative past due delinquency experiences.
And as we approached it, I think we found very quickly there was a huge opportunity for businesses. And certainly as we think about the enterprises we serve today, which are largely telecommunications, financial institutions and utility companies, you know what, there is a better way. They care deeply about those customer relationships. And certainly when often collections would be a very negative experience, we've now been able to transform it into a very positive.
So it's a win win for the consumer that they're treated with empathy and respect and empowered with solutions. And then it's also a huge win for the businesses and the enterprises that we serve. They're able to improve on their delinquency rates. They're able to recover more and improve those cure rates. They're able to extend the long term value of those customers. They can reduce churn because we're digitizing through our solution. And ultimately, we're consistently delivering upwards of a 10X ROI for these enterprises.
So we really have found that we've been able to create a pretty tremendous win-win in the market for both the consumer and for the enterprise we serve.