How Technology Budgeting Really Works in Collections: Insights from Arvest Bank, SCS & Latitude Software

Adam Parks (00:00)
Hello everybody, Adam Parks here with another receivables webinar. Today, I've got some really great guests and a great topic for us to discuss because there's so many of us that are either selling or working within organizations in the debt collection space. And I don't know that we all truly understand how decisions are actively being made when it comes to budgeting, when it comes to buying and making technology decisions. And I can tell you from the conversations we had as we were planning this session and this discussion. I learned a lot, so I'm sure there's a lot for everybody to learn today. But before we kick it off, I'd like to go through introductions for each person. Jeremy, starting with you, could you tell everyone a little about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?

Jeremy Ruth (00:45)
Yeah, absolutely Adam. Thank you for having me here today. I've been with Arvest Bank for 25 years. So it's kind of hard to remember how I got in this spot, but I actually have a background in subprime auto finance and made the move to banking in 2001 and have overseen the growth of our servicing from a $2 billion financial institution to now we're 28, 29 billion somewhere around in there. So a lot of growth over the last 25 years and just managing different areas of default servicing for Arvest Bank, consumer, commercial, indirect lending, equipment, finance, leasing, overdrawn DDA, a little bit of everything.

Adam Parks (01:22)
Excellent, excellent. And Megan, could you tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got to the seat that you're in today?

Megan Hebert (01:29)
Yeah, thanks Adam. I'd love to. Megan Hebert, I am president and owner of Specialized Collection Systems. SES has been around since the 70s. I joined in 2013 and then purchased it in 2017. To be honest, this space and owning a collection agency wasn't necessarily on my professional roadmap, but when it happened, I fell in love with the company, the people, the clients, the consumers and patients that we work with were exclusively medical and just realizing how big of a role the third party debt space plays in the financial well-being of our entire country really just kind of hooked me. So here I am today.

Jeremy Ruth (02:07)
Okay. you

Adam Parks (02:11)
Love it. And Cris, how about yourself?

Cris Bjelajac (02:14)
Hi everyone, I'm Cris Bjelajac. I'm Vice President of Business Operations at Latitude Software, a new division of TEC Services Group. I'm really pleased to be here and thank you Jeremy and Megan for joining us. Been in the collection space for about 20 years now, started at SoundBite Communications, an outbound provider back in the day, and joined the Latitude team in 2018.

Jeremy Ruth (02:21)
Okay.

Adam Parks (02:37)
Excellent. So, I mean, look, this is, ⁓ I think, a very interesting conversation for us today because everybody's budgeting cycle looks different. part of the reason that I really enjoy the group that we have here to talk today is that everybody's coming from very different perspectives. Jeremy's coming from a large organization. Megan's coming from a much smaller, more nimble organization. And Cris has been working with all types of organizations of all shapes and sizes as we think about

Jeremy Ruth (02:37)
Okay.

Adam Parks (03:04)
budgeting and what's that ultimately going to look like as we plan for the upcoming years? So I guess let me start by floating a question to the whole group here. Or Jeremy, maybe we could start with you. What does it look like when you start thinking about budgeting for technology

Adam Parks (03:21)
in your organization?

Jeremy Ruth (03:24)
It looks pretty muddy if I'm being honest. There's no direct path from point A to point B, it doesn't seem. I mean, we have an annual budget cycle that we have to go through just like any other organization. We have to put forth our initiatives, but asking for money is just one piece of it. We also have to ask for resources. And if the money and the resources don't align, I can budget for it all day long. But if I don't have the resources to act on it.

It's not very useful to have the money. So it's kind of a one and two. We start our budget cycle, you know, late Q3 every year. And so by then you're planning for the following year. But so is everybody else in the bank and everybody else is also planning for resources. So it's a little bit of a difficult path from point A to point B, not just I'm going to raise my money, ask for some money and I get it.

Adam Parks (04:11)
Fair enough. it sounds like it's a more complex process. Now, Megan, on the other side of the equation is a more nimble organization. How do you view that budgeting process on an annual basis?

Megan Hebert (04:23)
Well, personally, the type A person in me loves the structure that you've got and the fact that you have no choice but to stick to the timeline that's been outlined for the entire company. But the smaller agencies, you're right, there's a lot more movement to it and there's a lot more fluidity to it. It is end of year. So of course, everybody's looking at what they've spent in 2025 and preparing what we're doing for 2026. I had a great conversation with a bunch of my peers, other small agency owners on the small agency I am on Monday and this was a topic, right? And one of the really cool topics was how and where should we look for any expense leaks in 2025 to make sure that we take care of them, clean them up so they don't become part of 2026 to allow us to have more money and budget to spend on any upgrades or new vendor integration we want or things like that. So I think with smaller agencies, the best answer is we're constantly looking at it

Jeremy Ruth (05:13)
you

Megan Hebert (05:20)
adjusting in it to it, but we're not tied to a hardcore number, which is really nice because when a new tech comes up or a new vendor presents themselves to you and you know that that will be at good value, you can make that switch immediately versus having to wait for the next fiscal cycle for it.

Adam Parks (05:37)
Interesting. So you're going through a cleansing process of the current budget before you start thinking about what that next year's budget is going to look like. Jeremy, in a larger organization, are you going through a similar process or is it more about adding those building blocks for the future?

Jeremy Ruth (05:53)
Yeah, it is a similar process. mean, as you know, there's always a push to be more profitable, to operate more efficiently. it's, know, when you look at a budgeting cycle, are you asking for budget for FTEs or are asking for budget for technology? Because typically it's not both. And so you absolutely have to go through an assessment to see what are our needs and are the needs within a bank within the default servicing area are those needs aligned at an enterprise level with some other departments. And if so, maybe some other departments budget could be leveraged and not just my budget. And maybe I can be a stakeholder in a project rather than a project owner. So yeah, we absolutely go through those. It's almost like a prioritization exercise. It's like, what am I prioritizing for 2026? Am I prioritizing technology or am I prioritizing needing more people or am I prioritizing travel? We absolutely have to go through that exercise.

Adam Parks (06:45)
Interesting. Now, Cris is someone who's been working with all different size and shape organizations for years and going through that technology sales cycle. How do you view that budgeting process from the outside?

Cris Bjelajac (06:57)
It makes us need to be more flexible and any software provider to be more flexible to meet the needs of the customers. On the creditor side, especially at Big Bank, Jeremy's first point was the alignment between the budget and the company's resources. What can we do as a software provider or a services provider

Cris Bjelajac (07:18)
to make it easier on Jeremy to sort of, you know move his initiatives forward. We need to be an advocate for him. If he needs some flexibility on bringing in resources, that's something that we should be able to do. If it's a cost situation and it might be something that a small agency or any kind of an agency might be more concerned

Jeremy Ruth (07:28)
you

Cris Bjelajac (07:40)
about, we need to be flexible on those ends. know, Megan might be able to bring resources to bear much more easily than Jeremy can. we, you know, so we might have to be flexible on price. So flexibility is key. If you're working with a vendor who isn't flexible, it just slows everything down. They may love your software. They may love the services that you provide, but if you don't put yourself in a partnership arrangement with them, they're going to get frustrated with you. You're going to get frustrated with them. And so it really, we just need to be more flexible to support our customers or our prospects as well.

Jeremy Ruth (08:12)
Okay.

Megan Hebert (08:14)
Cris, I love that. I want to add real quick one thing to that if you don't mind. If we take the budgeting out of QuickBooks, another big element that we do is we look at the time, right? If you've got so many different new technologies or projects

Adam Parks (08:16)
Sure, please.

Megan Hebert (08:27)
that you want to have on the radar, I literally bounce them out throughout the year because I know I can't do them all in Q1 as much as I'd like to. So from a budgeting, even just using the word budgeting, if we're not talking financial, remove it from QuickBooks and you're just looking at resources from the smaller, agency or just even a mid-size agency, you can't do it all at once. We don't have massive teams to say, these five projects are going to get completed in Q1. We have to be very strategic about it. So that's not only who you're choosing, but when you're doing it. And then you kind of put it all together, like what's the proper domino order that needs to happen. So then at the end of 2026, we've really gotten a bang for our budget, both time and money.

Jeremy Ruth (08:57)
You

Cris Bjelajac (09:10)
I feel like in all these years, I think it used to be back in the day in the aughts, know, price and budget was an issue. That was kind of like the hardest

thing to work through. I think it's exactly reverse now. think it's people have generally have excellent budgets. They know what their needs are going to be. They have set aside money in advance for large purchases, but the resourcing is always the number one issue. I would say that's 75 % of the.

Jeremy Ruth (09:22)
Okay.

Cris Bjelajac (09:40)
hassle, so to speak.

Megan Hebert (09:42)
Yeah, and it also goes to we're not necessarily buying huge pieces of equipment anymore, right? We're renting monthly use of capacity of someone else's. So that also makes for a budgeting standpoint a lot easier versus having to invest, you know, 30 to 100 grand upfront one day on a project that you've selected. Now you're being able to say, okay, with this service model, this is what it's going to cost me monthly. So I think you're right, Cris, we're able to make decisions on spending the money a little bit faster, but then it still is, we don't want to spend the money unless

Jeremy Ruth (09:52)
you

Megan Hebert (10:14)
We're really putting the time into activating it and really engaging and putting it into our overall operations. So we're getting every penny that we can out of that service.

Adam Parks (10:24)
I mean, it seems like there's a difference or a line between the capital spend and the operational spend because we're budgeting IT resources as well as we're budgeting the dollars themselves. Now, Jeremy, from a larger organization, what's that? What's that process feel like when we're not just talking about the money, we're talking about the IT resources that are available or not available to us?

Jeremy Ruth (10:47)
Yeah, it's probably one of the biggest challenges that I have. We are, you know, I've got a team of about 85 and I do have my own technical team, my own product analyst. There's not a whole lot that we couldn't do within our collection software ourselves, but trying to connect it to other bank core systems, I've got to have resources. I've got to have access to the DBAs. I've got to have somebody build a file for me to test the file just to send something to a vendor for something as simple as a payment processing or a text campaign. somebody has to build those files and those files don't necessarily come from our collection system, they come from our core banking system and we don't have access to that. that's just phase one. I've got to have access to DBAs just to test something and we have a limited resource. I'm at a bottleneck from day one if we have limited resources there and that's not really a resource that I can augment. I have the ability to augment resources within my BU when I need to but trying to get somebody to augment a resource from a technical capacity in another department that typically don't happen. then, you get beyond that, beyond just the DBAs just to test it. Everything is in the cloud today. We have to do a cloud migration that requires resources. We want to go to the latest version of a piece of software we've already got. You got to have the resources to update a software and then you want some of those same resources to onboard new software. Well, now you have to prioritize. Do you want to update what you have? because of resource limitations or do you want something new and live with what you got? So all of those resources, and I'm not the only one in a business, our bank, our size, I'm not the only one asking for those same resources. Our treasury management department needs those resources. Our mortgage servicing department needs those resources. Our account opening needs those resources. Our internet needs those resources. So it really is a challenge trying to get resource allocation from any technical standpoint.

Especially when I joke and say I'm on the South side of banking, right? I'm not an income generator. I service all the stuff in banking nobody wants to talk about. So when you raise your hand and say, need resources, they're like, yeah, we know you do, but there's 80 other people over here that need resources from a frontline standpoint that generate income. So guess where they go for the most part. Not a bad deal, not complaining. It's just a reality that when you have to prioritize resources, you have to prioritize them based on business need, not just my name.

Megan Hebert (13:07)
Jeremy, you're a reminder that grass is not always greener. Well, I was just going to say, you you said it, you had 85 people and my first initial thought was, man, what I could do with 85 people. And then you kept talking and I was like, yeah, the grass is not always greener. Nevermind. I like my small agency. There's power in both of them,

Adam Parks (13:08)
So Megan, an organization you're... Yeah, I was gonna ask you the same question.

Jeremy Ruth (13:26)
That's right. There is. mean, you know, our folks, have four people on my team that are certified to do what we call mini bots, robotic process automation. And so even without having access to IT resources, we've tried to teach ourselves and go get certifications ourselves to make technical improvements where we can, because we're building our own bots and we're doing about a half a million dollars a year in process improvements without any additional IT resources.

Just think if they could give me a few of those resources, I could probably do a million, million and a half a year in process improvement savings. But those same resources again are trying to be spread across all the bank, not just the default area.

Adam Parks (14:03)
And as you go through the process of suggesting new technology or trying to deploy new technology, what does that look like from a compliance perspective? We've talked about the capital resource, the technical resource. What compliance resources have to be at play in order to move something forward?

Jeremy Ruth (14:19)
You giving that to me, Adam?

Adam Parks (14:21)
I'm giving that to everybody.

Jeremy Ruth (14:23)
So I think the best way I could explain our experience is that everything is by committee at our bank. And it could be because we have a fairly unique structure. We are a series of 14 community banks under a parent umbrella. 15, 20 years ago, when I tried to get something approved for the bank, I would have to go to 14 bank presidents because it was their money that was investing in bank capital.

And I would have to get a buy-in at committee of a majority of those folks to say, yes, we need a collection system. And it was so fragmented that at one point we literally did have three different collection systems inside the bank that different groups were using. And it took me almost three years to get those consolidated into one. And it took us another five years to get to new technology, which is now five years dated for us. So just when you have to go get those those assets allocated, those resources allocated, you have to look at from a couple of different committees, compliance is involved, IT is involved, third party provider risk management is involved. You have all of those groups. You have to go through an enterprise architectural control board to make sure the architecture, whatever you're bringing on board works. You have to go through a technical acquisition committee. You know, they have to go look at the geopolitical climate of where some of the servicing is going to take place if it's offshore.

All of those things are involved and there's just several different committees that you have to go through a new business idea submission form. You submit that and everybody agrees that it's a good idea. That's not an approval for the project. That's just an approval to go to the next committee. So there are various roles throughout the bank that are on each committee to get you from one step to the next from an assessment standpoint.

Adam Parks (16:01)
So Megan, from your perspective, I know in a smaller organization, it operates quite differently, but how do you look at the application of those three resources in a combined factor?

Megan Hebert (16:11)
So yeah, from a compliance standpoint, you know, we don't have committees, Jeremy. It's me, myself, and I and what my team leads depending on the project at hand, right? So with healthcare and talking about compliance, just to hit back on the main point of that first question, is compliance isn't a phase at the end. And you were saying this too, Jeremy, right? It defines our parameters. And so we start with that. We start with how does compliance plan? And this is any collections, but healthcare, there's a whole extra layer. And then you've got federal and then all the different states if you're collecting in multi-state.

Jeremy Ruth (16:28)
you

Megan Hebert (16:45)
system we implement, every script we deploy, every new communication channel we turn on or off. Everything has to start with a compliance review and then have many compliance checks along the way. mean, think about it when you bring on a new vendor, they have compliance concerns and now those compliance concerns have to match with your platform compliance rules and regulations. And so,

Megan Hebert (17:10)
You know, it's hard to say that there's just one point in any onboarding or bringing on of a new technology. For us, it's the guardrails. It's a constant element in the process.

Jeremy Ruth (17:22)
You know, I think just to add to that, Adam, the first step in our project, we actually have what's called a change risk management committee and it's got executives from several different business units. I'm a voting member on that committee as well. And that's really where you it's what type of risks are we willing to take with any change that we implement? And so we assess that initial risk from a credit standpoint, from a marketing standpoint from a training standpoint, an operational risk standpoint, from an enterprise risk standpoint. that's just step one is just to assess the risk with any change that we want to implement at the bank.

Adam Parks (17:59)
So Cris, when you're trying to work with all these different kinds of organizations, mean, first of all, how much of this do you have visibility into throughout that sales cycle?

Cris Bjelajac (18:11)
Well, a lot of it is absolutely assumed. So if you think about a collections management system like Latitude, there probably is not another piece of software on the planet that knows more about a particular debtor or end user or customer of our customers than what we have in our database. If somebody's under collections, they have healthcare debt, they have credit card debt, they have mortgage debt and automotive debt that goes across just about every sort of psychographic capability that a CRM for collections can manage. So as a provider in that arena, you can't just think about just one thing. You've got to have your info security absolutely 100 % buttoned up and be thinking.

Cris Bjelajac (19:02)
what's coming down in the future that might impact that info security posture that you're providing to your customer. So for example, AI, like just this year. I manage a lot of our info security. come through me and then I parse it out to the rest of the organization. And then what's changed in the, you know, we get 50 to 80 of those per year from our existing customers and from prospects. What's changed this year is there's always a new section all about AI.

Cris Bjelajac (19:31)
And we're still on our AI strategy of what we will incorporate into AI, into our software, and how we will use AI within our organization. And answering those questions is going to evolve month to month to month to month. So it's a snapshot in time. But we need to be able to provide those and provide updates to our customers. Just It's a constant, I don't want to say a battle, it's something constant. to continuously work at it, have the latest update, and be able to provide that in a moment's notice to our customers and prospects so that they can get into the budgeting cycle and get through their info security reviews.

Megan Hebert (20:08)
I would also add, one thing that we haven't mentioned from compliance is the clients and who we're trying to service, right? Because one client's ⁓ threshold might be higher than our standard or lower, right, vice versa, or just different from others. So that brings a big part of it, especially, Cris, you're talking about data. Data, everybody is protecting it as best they can, and it's a high priority, again, especially from clients. So that could also change from a scheduling you

Megan Hebert (20:38)
scope of bringing on certain projects knowing that one thing might be against what you have with one client contract versus another. So compliance, the joke in, you know, in healthcare collections is compliance is everybody's job in every business and every organization regardless of how big you are. And I mean, I think this conversation is just kind of proof of that. There's no end to where compliance doesn't touch even when it comes to the financial side of when we're going to invest and when we're not.

Jeremy Ruth (21:05)
You know, that's a good call out, Megan, about the contract. That's something that we actually We actually tried to address that to help speed up the process. Probably seven or eight years ago now, we were getting ready to onboard. We needed to onboard additional third party agencies for post-charge off outsourcing. And we did an RFI. We brought, I don't know, eight or nine or 10 onboard. And to your point, we got to look and every contract was different and was like, we're all doing the same thing. Y'all are servicing, all the vendors we're gonna onboard is gonna work the same paper. We're gonna pay the same amount. We all want the same compliance.

So we took seven different contracts, sent them to a council and said, we want you to pick out everything that protects the agencies and everything that protects the bank and put it together. And let's see what we can do to come up with a single contract. Our prime, second, terse fees, our settlement amounts, all of that's the same. And surprisingly, when we push that out to agencies now, we typically don't have to go back and forth for two or three months. It's just a small piece of an onboarding cycle or it's a piece after we get past the budgeting cycle, obviously, but it is something that we try to help speed up the process of at least evaluating who we're gonna do business with and how, at least we're all on the same contract. So when I do have to send a contract to a TPP or contract review, they're looking at the same contract. They're not having to go through it with a fine-tooth comb every time. So good call out.

Megan Hebert (22:29)
That's cool, Jeremy, real cool.

Adam Parks (22:31)
Now that we're talking about AI and compliance in the same sentence, I think there's some rabbit holes that we could really start to run down. But I've got another question here because we've talked about what does it take to get these pieces in place, right? We're talking about financial, technical resources, compliance resources, but we also all know that things change when you've got all of these cooks in the kitchen. And so we've already started going down the path, you know, mentally of we're going to get this new piece of software deployed at a bank or a collection agency. But at some point during the process, something changes. So I guess, Jeremy, starting with you, what does that look like if something needs to change once you've already started down the path? You've got some of these approvals, you've got people on board with making this happen, but now something needs to change or you've learned something new through the process. Do you have to start over again? Is there some sort of a modification to the process? What does that look like in your world?

Jeremy Ruth (22:58)
Okay. You know, Adam, really depends on what is causing the change in the project. I'm going to say if it's scope creep, if like we started with the scope of a project and it starts creeping outside those guardrails, we're typically not going to get those changes in. They're going to say, hey, that's a separate project. That's something you need down the road. I think one of the best ones that I can remember is when we were onboarding Latitude, there was a system configuration the way Latitude had a one-to-one setup. And really the way we do business, we needed a one-to-many. And it was nothing that we could fix. And so that was part of a change that Latitude made for us that helped us get that project. It kept us from having to go through a change request internally to change things on our side. It was, and I'm not saying it was a simple change for Latitude, but it was that relationship between us and the onboarding team that says, hey, we both understand this is a problem. We can try to fix it on our side, but if I do, it's a change request. We got to go back through a couple of committees, but if y'all change this on your side and you can get this approved, we can move forward faster. And that's ultimately what we did. So anytime that's going to Anything that's going to try to keep that scope creep from expanding and it's not a change that has to be reevaluated, I'm going to try to avoid changing the project. The thing that I can't control is when personnel changes. And I've had that happen. We've had CIO changes. We've had, you know, we had a business relationship manager. That person left the bank and we've not had the same relationship since then. So there are a lot of different changes that we can control and some changes that we can't control for sure.

Adam Parks (25:00)
Now, for Megan, for you, what does it look like to change course midstream on any technology project?

Megan Hebert (25:05)
We change, we just shift, we swivel over, start. I mean, I think this is where maybe Jeremy, this is where had your grass is greener moment, right? There's, we don't have to do a change request, right? Small agencies, if we're in the middle of a project and we're sitting on a meeting with a vendor and we realize that our original request to have the widget go left and now we need the widget to go right, we just say, hey, make it go right, let's move this through. I will say when the vendor then says, hey, I need to get with my team and put in a change request for this client request, that drives me a little bit crazy. I'm like, no, let's just make it, let's just go, let's get this moving. Because going back to the time, I've allotted so many weeks for this project from start to finish. So looking to move as quickly as possible. Now with that being said,

Jeremy Ruth (25:40)
Okay. Okay.

Megan Hebert (25:52)
I've never started a project without a change request happening. The idea and the desire is always just realizing the moment that what you thought was gonna be best as the outcome is no longer good. So let's rock and roll and push this in the right direction. Because every great plan and every great project roadmap looks good and looks perfect at the very beginning.

Jeremy Ruth (26:09)
you

Megan Hebert (26:17)
but on day one, minute five, it probably already doesn't look as good as it did at the beginning, right? And so you've gotta be flexible and able to make those changes. So, Jeremy, to your point, it's almost like having all the right people in the room, so when that change happens and when you need to make a quick pivot you don't have to worry about the change request, because everybody's there in the room at the same time. That's the luxury I have in the fact that I'm in the room and therefore I've got everybody that we need there to make the decision. So it's quick. It's one of my favorite things.

Jeremy Ruth (26:47)
You know, I think just talking through that aspect of a project is changing that. I mean, I do a lot of woodworking and painting old cars and wiring old cars and, home remodel projects. don't sit still well, but the thing that I figured out, whether it's a technical project, a realignment with team, it all, or painting a car or building a wood project, it all starts with planning. If you have poor planning, the project's going to have changes throughout.

I can tell the difference when I'm making something from scratch and my ideas are coming to me as I'm working through creating something from wood versus when I'm using a plan and I'm cutting specific pieces and they're supposed to go together like they're supposed to, right? Those are two different experiences for sure. And so I think the, and that's one thing I think that we do fairly well as an organization that not just, know, Hey, we need AI, we need call recording, we need something, we need a new telephony solution.

It's not just one group that gets to say, is what we need. Everybody gets that, that two cents in it, but we try to get everything up front. may take us longer on an implementation because we're asking all of those questions of all of those stakeholders upfront to try to avoid that scope creep or try to avoid that, that change request in the middle of a project.

Megan Hebert (28:05)
Yeah, and I think not only is it the planning and I love that because you got to at least have something outlined, but the ability to not then be handcuffed to it because it'd be a shame to get halfway through that project and see that that plan had good intentions, but it's not going to give you the outcome. But you're stuck with it. You're married to it. You're so you're going to see it through the end. So then you've invested this time and money, but you still don't have what you want out of it. And Cris, I'm sure you have this all the time with onboarding new clients or getting their systems set up. They think they know exactly what they want and then they realize all that your platform can do and so they're saying but I want that add that to the plan right so then knowing okay how much time how much more money so a lot of times when I start any new project we outline that plan and I just say look I'm gonna start asking for a whole bunch of stuff extra throughout the path like throughout this I just know myself if it ever gets to be

Jeremy Ruth (28:35)
you

Megan Hebert (28:58)
x percent over what we've already agreed to, you need to stop and let me know. Otherwise, let's just keep this ship going as quick as we possibly can.

Cris Bjelajac (29:07)
Yeah, like that, you have a really realistic expectation of how projects could go. was thinking when Jeremy was talking, the key performance indicator of a home improvement project is how many extra trips to Lowe's did you make back and forth? So how does that translate to software installs? And it's the same thing. I could ask Beth who...

Jeremy Ruth (29:13)
you

Cris Bjelajac (29:28)
leads a lot of our projects here at Latitude. Like, how many trips to Lowe's did you make on this one? If it's more than four then something went wrong along the way. One thing that I would, and by the way, mean, Jeremy's terrific at this, and I'm sure Megan is too, but a certain level of openness with your vendor will really help in that area.

Jeremy Ruth (29:44)
Okay.

Cris Bjelajac (29:52)
If you come to the vendor and just say, we need to make a change or this needs to be different, and without your professional services teams kind of understanding why that change is important.

They can't recommend potential other solutions. So if it's simply saying, hey, it's gotta be this way and you need to turn this in this direction, when my team could suggest, well, why don't we try, the business need is this, why don't we try this, or we can achieve that in another way, would that be acceptable? And so it's a brainstorming session. when the and the teams are brainstorming together to solve business problems, that's gonna save you money, time, and effort, and trips to Lowe's on the back end. that, if I had to recommend to people out there, is just be open with your professional services and work together rather than being so, know, dictatorial sounds a really heavy word, but you know. You really want to establish a really great working relationship so we can work together to solve those business problems.

Adam Parks (30:53)
To me, it sounds a lot like the difference between driving a cruise ship and driving a speedboat. Right? When we're driving a cruise ship, it's preparing to turn left, right? And now we're all going to start, everybody start turning left now versus being able to go back and forth and make those moves in a more nimble fashion. But I can see benefits and drawbacks to either one of those scenarios. But Cris, how do you build a business around supporting organizations with such a diverse set of needs or multiple organizations?

Jeremy Ruth (30:53)
Okay.

Cris Bjelajac (31:21)
It doesn't come easily and it's through trial and error. We've been around since 1990. So we have experience and we have embedded experience within the company and we don't let that, we try not to let that experience leave the company. So it just becomes ingrained in the business. But the most amazing project launch would be a brand new, maybe a brand new agency and they are just starting their whole processes and we could just sell them what's on the, you know, what we talked about, what's on the truck. Oh, just take us right out of the box and work your business processes in the way latitude does things. Well, that's never gonna, that never happens. know, you know, agencies who are, you know, leaving their old vendor, maybe coming to latitude, they've been in business 20, 30 years. They have things that, you know, they've been doing all that time. Are they willing and open to changing a few things? Sure. But,

Jeremy Ruth (31:54)
you

Cris Bjelajac (32:19)
You know, we need, know, vendors need to be understand that and be able to blend into that situation. And, you know, I see, I see this happen, you know, a lot of young companies, new, new young vendors come out and they're ready to, you know, conquer the world with their new technology, with their new AI technology, but they have no idea. They have no, you know, learned experiences that they can apply to their technology. And so there's a big mismatch. They might do something very cool that a third-party agency or a creditor wants to use, but they've totally missed the boat on the long-term requirements and the long-term business processes that they need to work their way into.

Jeremy Ruth (33:01)
Okay. you

Megan Hebert (33:03)
Okay, I'll add.

Adam Parks (33:03)
I've been in this business for 20 years and I've never heard such a detailed discussion about how these processes actually work at a bank. And so even from the planning calls that we were doing, I was blown away to understand now how that works. And I've sold enterprise level, I've sold to small businesses throughout my entire career, but never, I don't think really understood the level of depth that some of these organizations need to go through in order to make a slight change to the left or slight change to the right on the original course that was planned.

Megan Hebert (33:31)
Hey, and I'll add to this. love to what Cris said about never is there an agency or bank out there that we all look the same. Well, I say that about my clients all the time and it's similar, right? So I'm their vendor. And so when we're onboarding them after we spent, you know, however long painful amount of time getting them to say yes and sign the contract and now they're ready and Cris, your sales cycle is probably just as long as as the collection agencies, maybe longer. But then to your point Adam, if they start asking too many things and turning right and left faster or more aggressively than we're capable of, then we have to look at our margin creep, right? And okay, they're asking for us to do so much more. I'm small and I'm able to say yes to it, but does it fit with what works with SCS? Am I gonna have the margin that I set out to have? And so, moving quick and being able to say yes without the committee and without the change reports and tickets is great.

But then I am capable of hitting that creep, I think a lot faster. And so I constantly have to keep myself in check. Just because this client is asking it, doesn't mean six months from now that this client is still going to be a client that I wanted to even have at the first place. Because they've asked so many times and I have been able to turn right, then realign back left. So there's a grayness to it. But saying yes quickly is lovely. But then making sure you take the time to go back and say,

Megan Hebert (34:58)
what does this look like six months from now, now that I said yes, right? So it's always kind of reviewing that. But it's also not just the money, the time, compliance. You're looking at all those things that weren't there at the beginning of the project. Now they've presented themselves in the middle and it's like jumping ahead and saying, okay, six months from now, if nothing else changes, am I still happy with these decisions? It's a tough one.

Jeremy Ruth (35:19)
Yeah, you know, it just. Cris made a good point about understanding what you want versus what you need. And I'll say it a couple of different ways. We knew how we did business with our old system. And the one thing I kept telling my team, I'm not trying to build our old system. We're not trying to rebuild that. If we were going to rebuild our old system, just stay on the one we've got. We want something new. We're asking for something new. We need to learn how to use something new. So we try to keep it in our minds as we were doing workflow mapping. This is how we do business today.

We still need to do those same tasks, those same responsibilities tomorrow, but we could do them in a new way. So we have to be just as open-minded as we're asking the vendors to be so that maybe some of those pivots need to come on the vendor side because they need to adjust to our way of doing business. But they have some subject matter expertise that we want to leverage also. And so there's some opportunities for us to say, hey, this is how we do it today, but does your system provide us a better way to do it? And let's switch the way we're doing business.

I won't say that that's been 50-50. Cris may tell you it's been 80-20 that we're pulling the ropes. I may tell you it's 80-20 they're pulling the ropes. But I think it's that, it's like marriages are not 50-50. They're 80-20. Both of you figure out what you do, what you like to do 80 % of the time. And then you just figure out the 20 % that both of you, neither one of you like to do. So Cris knows 80 % of what his software needs to do. I know 80 % of what my team needs to do. Let's just figure out that 20 % and make it work for both of us.

Adam Parks (36:47)
Which leads me into a kind of another line of questioning here, which is a little bit more along the lines of professional services and identifying the point in time in the process in which it's time to bring in expertise. Right. And I think this is a great transition because now when we're talking about expertise, we're putting these things in place. We're organizing ourselves to deploy a new piece of technology, but how do we start to identify that moment in time when we need to go.

Okay, we need some technical support or we need to get some of our technical resources and knowledge from Cris versus trying to build this out internally on our own technology infrastructure. Because I can assume that both Jeremy and Megan, regardless of the size of your IT teams, their expertise on Latitude software specifically, I'm sure did not exist on day one. So how do you start to identify that right moment in time to where, okay, I'm going to need these additional resources from a third party in order for me to move this over the finish line?

Megan Hebert (37:52)
I would say it goes back to what Jeremy was saying with planning. It's at the very beginning, just like compliance should be at the very beginning. Understanding all the different players that need to be involved or all the different area of expertise you need to have in the room for different conversations. Because I don't want to bring an expert into one call of the project if it doesn't even pertain to them. Same with, I'm sure, I don't want to speak for you Jeremy, you don't need to have all 85 people of your team on every single call you know, going back to the planning and road mapping out that project, when you're saying after you've made the decision, yes, we're going to initiate this, then it's who are the key players and at what phase of this project do they need to be here. And let's be clear, a phase of a project could be one day.

Jeremy Ruth (38:32)
Okay.

Megan Hebert (38:37)
Right? It's one small element. These don't have to be massive projects, right? They're not as big of onboarding with Cris to his platform. They could be smaller ones as well. But knowing who those key players are, because then once you write that out, you'll see, and I typically do, I'll see question marks. Like who needs to be in that meeting? And it's more than just me a lot of times. So who else do I need to bring in? Do I need to go to Cris and say, Cris, I need somebody from your team to represent and be here to help me understand this aspect of

Jeremy Ruth (38:53)
you

Megan Hebert (39:06)
because I don't have the in-house expertise or do I need to grab a consultant that I've worked with that maybe has that so I think it goes to Jeremy's point a minute or two back about just having proper plans from the very beginning.

Jeremy Ruth (39:21)
And at the risk of saying I'm going to contradict myself, we didn't plan very well for that. But I appreciate you giving me credit, For us, was kind of a, I think when we went into our initial biggest project, which was converting software, collection software to Latitude, I'm going to say we didn't know what we didn't know until we knew it. And then once we knew it, we started making decisions differently.

You know, we went in our old software. was kind of a system administrator. My director of operations was kind of a system administrator. We could set some stuff up, you know, you know, latitude was a couple of owners ago when I first started initiating with them. it's like, yeah, you can have a system administrator to do this and this. It's an easy system to work. Well, it is, especially if you're doing nothing but unsecured. I'm going to pick on agencies, unsecured agency work where you're getting files in and that's your system of record.

Well, I was bringing DDAs in and loans and consumer loans and commercial loans. And I have another system of record with credit cards that I want to put in there. So that kind of gets convoluted. And we had the expertise on the bank at the bank with our IT teams and with the, the, the gentleman that we had hired at the time to be our quote administrator. And we got that project across the finish line, but then we realized to what Cris was saying a minute ago.

There was so much more out there that we didn't know that we could take advantage of the way the system works, the way that we could put accounts in front of our loss mitigation team or our repossession team or our equipment finance leasing team is like, well, we need to figure out how to do that. Well, we started figuring out how to do that. well, we can create panels for this and that. we can, we need some more expertise. So you said it earlier, Adam, we went out to try to hire a latitude expert and they're a unicorn.

You you can't find them. I literally tried to get a guy that I talked to from the UK to move across the pond to come over to Arkansas, which obviously did not work, right? I don't know anybody that's going to move across the pond to Arkansas, but it was worth a sale. mean, you have to try to sell them. But we realized at that point that one, we had enough knowledge to get us to that point, but what got us here is not going to get us there. And we needed additional resources. So we.

Adam Parks (41:10)
Challenging.

Jeremy Ruth (41:25)
We started figuring out what are the skill sets that an individual needs to start learning latitude. You need SQL. So we needed SQL. We knew we needed somebody that was from a data analytics background, because we were going to be putting more data into the system than we'd ever put into any other system. And we need to get it out to turn it into information. And so that's kind of what we ended up doing is we hired an external candidate to work with our internal candidate. But this is where we started paying for professional services.

We knew TEC had the expertise that we needed. And at the time, know, Latitude was owned by Genesys. They're more a telephony solution than they are agency solution. TEC provided those services. So we, think we're on Cris, maybe our third year of a professional services agreement where, you know, our core teams, our IT teams, they will handle the heavy lifting with updates, with, you know, system updates and, and installations and connections. But the day-to-day stuff that my team needs, if we need to move accounts from one queue to another, If we need a new panel, we basically pay TEC to train our administrators on how to do some of these things. And so now we know what an onboarding or an upgrade looks like. We know what day to day looks like. Now, if we have new needs, we can assess, is that something we can do ourselves or is that something we need to pay TEC to do? If we've got two or three resources that are working on assignments or cues and we need a panel built, let's pay TEC for the panel. I we have a standing a managed services agreement, we need to use those hours anyway. So that's kind of the way that we go through. But what we do, we have a weekly call between my team and our consultants at TEC on a weekly basis that my director of operations and their consultants work with. So they know this is what our side's working on. This is what your side's working on. hey, here's a better way to do that. Or here's another way that if you tried this.

And so we kind of just manage that together. It's not a us versus them. It's a relationship. takes both of us to make that product and that solution successful for our team. And if our team's successful and happy with it, we're not going to leave that software and go anywhere else. So it really is a relationship to try to figure out when to spend the money and capitalize it versus when to go into a services agreement.

Cris Bjelajac (43:41)
Jeremy, I'm glad you brought that up. think when I joined Latitude back in 2018, we weren't fostering our network of expertise out there. So a lot of people think of expertise, you got to have it in-house. And we did, we do have it, a software company can't keep a lot of people on the bench just in case. And so you need to work on the network. And so we established a better relationship with TEC and other consultants in the collections industry and said, hey, here's latitude knowledge, here's training if you need it. And so we spent a lot of time and effort and money trying to broaden our network of expertise because as Jeremy said before, it's a small universe of people in our industry. And then you take a subsegment of people who know particular platforms and those people are valuable, but you need to have those relationships. just, know, Jeremy, you know, or a counterpart of him at one of our customers might say, how do you do go about this? And we can't look at them with a dumb look in our face and say, I don't know, you you're up, you're on your own. No, I need to be able to pick up, pick up my Rolodex, find somebody who can solve that problem.

Jeremy Ruth (44:39)
you

Cris Bjelajac (44:57)
Additionally, one of the wonderful things about being a division of TEC now is now we're all on board together. If there's a level of expertise that a project particularly needs that we don't have on the bench, then we can bring them in as a contractor. then we don't have to go through onboarding at, know, Jeremy doesn't need to onboard this person, will onboard them. And it will be under the auspices of TEC and that flexibility and that speed to be able to help somebody like Jeremy or Megan when they have a I think is critical. So it's one of the best things about being purchased by TEC is our network has grown and our ability to service our customers faster, easier, cheaper, is improved exponentially.

Jeremy Ruth (45:39)
Now I am going to take back some of my credit I gave Megan back because we are planning a lot better today because we are planning for 26 and because we already have a managed services agreement in place some of the things that we're planning for 26 I don't have to go out and bring on a new vendor I don't have to go get a new contract I mean there's some things that I'm asking TEC to do actually not even TEC with Latitude it's some of their other partner vendors that we're looking at possibly expanding our relationship with And because I've already got a managed services agreement in place, I can leverage that, get some cost efficiency, some cost savings for me, expand my relationship with them, grow my relationship with a couple of other vendors, all within one contract, because we already have it in place. I'm not having to go through a three to six month onboarding process to get the help that I need today down the road. We've got that in place because we figured out there was value two years ago in that, and we just keep finding new ways to add value to that relationship.

Megan Hebert (46:34)
Yeah, Jeremy. Yeah, I was just going to add that was something I kind of said at the beginning, which I think is great. You said it a lot better is expense leaks that we could have. And I think one of the key areas that we could all stop and look for, regardless of our side, is look at our current vendors, look at our current partnerships that we have with our vendors. I would start with the ones that you have the stronger relationships with and that provide already the level of service.

Adam Parks (46:34)
One of the things that you- go ahead.

Megan Hebert (46:59)
that you like and that you're given the A plus two and then see what else they offer because I, you know, I found one last week where I was paying one vendor to do just one service only to find out that another vendor I had also offers it. So there is definitely a way where I can cut some costs there. So then going back to the whole point of this of how we finance from a financial point of view, looked at investments and technology upgrades and things like that. A lot of times the answers we already have the relationship. We already have some sort of in-house expertise and or have the relationship that they have the expertise so you can cut your costs and the investment becomes a lot easier, a smaller pill to swallow so to speak, when you really look to see what partners are already out there because we're definitely there's expense leaks happen everywhere in all sizes from big to small you know.

Adam Parks (47:47)
From a professional services standpoint, one of the things that I heard Jeremy talking about that was interesting to me was the educational process of the internal people. So looking at professional services kind of down two tracks. Track number one being how can I educate my team to do some of the simpler tasks, the day-to-day operational tasks to assist us in carrying our business forward, but at the same time understanding that sometimes these one-off projects do require that expertise.

And it's not just teach my people how to do it. It's I need you to go get these projects completed for me. And I need you to teach me how to do these functions so that we can carry these repetitive functions into the future. Cris, do you have a lot of organizations that view it in that format or is there more of a shift towards one of the other styles?

Cris Bjelajac (48:34)
No, the former. We definitely have that. think everybody's come to the realization if you're not operating that way, you're not helping your customer. You're setting yourself up for failure. if you're a software provider, you have to place your bets wisely as well. You can only sell so much software per year. You've got enough resources to support that software. You're not making good decisions about how you're allocating your time, you're not gonna hit your budget.

Adam Parks (49:06)
So as we go into our final few minutes of our discussion here today, and we did not even get through all of the themes, so I feel like there's definitely a follow-up discussion to be had here. I can't thank you guys enough. Is there anything that we didn't cover today, any final statements that anybody wants to make about their perspective on budgeting and planning for their technology roadmaps?

Jeremy Ruth (49:26)
You know, I'll just say from a creditor or even a larger FI or larger company standpoint, you know, for me, I've probably got a little bit of an advantage over Megan in some respects, and I'll use it like a new telephony solution. I mean, we needed updated call recording. We needed to be PCI compliant. We wanted to be able to send tags to do outbound campaigns and our old telephony didn't do that. Well, I've got out of my 85 associates, only about 20 of them, 25 of them are collectors. So me asking for new telephony solution, for a $28 billion bank, that doesn't really, that's like a tail wagging the dog, right? But our contact centers needed something as well. So they worked with our telecom department. Did they select the company or the vendor that we all, from a collections industry standpoint, might would have preferred because we see it at all of our conferences, or did they select a company that somebody else brought to the table? So what I gave up is having some say so in what vendor was selected but I gained being a stakeholder in that project. I didn't have to manage the budget. I didn't have to manage the project team. I just need to know what product are you gonna put in place for us to use? And so there's ways to manage resource needs at larger FIs. We've done it with that process. We've done it with ticketing, tracking our tickets internally. When we submit something to get changed to our collection software, my team uses the same ticketing system that our IT team uses so that we can keep some of those things on track and on budget as well. But that's just a couple of things that I would say from a project standpoint. And if you are at a bigger institutions and we had this role that kind of changed under our former CIO, it's coming back around, we call it a BRM, a business relationship manager. If you're at a large institution and your IT team has a BRM, get plugged in with a BRM because those BRMs meet and they know what all solutions everybody else is talking to at the bank.

And I've been able to leverage those conversations a time or two and get access to some new technology, get access to a piece of software that I didn't even know we had at the bank. I didn't even have to go through a contract onboarding or vendor selection. It was there and I just didn't even know about it. So there, there's some other avenues that when you're at a, yes, we've got some constraints, but we also have some advantages as well.

Megan Hebert (51:35)
Yeah, I would.

Adam Parks (51:35)
Very interesting to be able to leverage that. Go ahead, Megan.

Megan Hebert (51:38)
Yeah, I think what I would take away or what I think the most about when it comes to this is just how much it has changed in innovations and investing in technology can be seen as an expense or an investment. And I think it's important that we have the mindset of an investment, but then when it comes to accounting and what we're doing in our QuickBooks, so to speak, we need to be careful of that, right? Not everything can be under cost of goods. Some things are a true expense. And so one part that Adam, think we could have a whole nother hour on is just the accounting element of it and where this innovation falls and what that actually means for the business in general. But again, think innovation is a requirement for everybody regardless of the size. We cannot continue to do things like we did 10 years ago. We can't do things the same way as we did things two years ago. So we have to look to innovation and decide what is an appropriate. Project to add to your company and your agency based on a handful of things whether it's compliance or time or money or your platform Cris and what you're capable of helping with but I think just switching that mindset from expense to To a true investment but then being careful when it then transitions to the accounting department or what I call Wednesday

Jeremy Ruth (52:54)
Okay.

Adam Parks (52:56)
I like that, I like that. Cris, how about you, any final words?

Jeremy Ruth (52:58)
Okay.

Cris Bjelajac (53:01)
Yeah, think I just, you know, the ability to, you know, when you go through a procurement process, when you're buying software can become a little adversarial especially if you have an actual procurement department whose job is to beat up a vendor a little bit on price and things like that. And it can become adversarial there for a bit of time. But once that time is over, ⁓

Jeremy Ruth (53:14)
you

Cris Bjelajac (53:22)
Everybody needs to come break bread, meet at the table, establish personal relationships and understand what really drives every person at this project and how they're gonna see success within their company when this project is ultimately successful. And once everybody sort of understands that, we're all on the same page and we're all working together towards a successful deployment, but also making sure that everybody's business goals and personal goals within that structure are also being met. I think that's a great way to just kick off a good project.

Adam Parks (53:54)
I can't thank you all enough for joining me today. This has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. I know I learned a lot through today's discussion and I feel like there's a whole bunch of follow ups, Cris, as I'm starting to think my way through some of the things that we want to talk about in 2026 because this was in such detail and really gave me some insights into how other size and style organizations are functioning when it comes to IT. For those of you that are watching, if you have questions, comments, You can leave those in the comments here on LinkedIn and YouTube and we'll be responding to those. Or if you have additional topics you'd like to see us discuss, you can leave those in the comments below as well. But until next time, everyone, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. I really do appreciate your time.