Editor’s Note: Below are a few interesting tidbits AR.net discovered from industry players during last week’s Accounts Recovery Summit. Take a peak:

Reconnecting

Chuck Stigers, senior manager of portfolio risk operations of T-Mobile, revealed to attendees that his company’s 2011 focus will center not only on improving recoveries, but also on strategizing how to facilitate the practice of reestablishing service to customers who were cut off due to delinquencies and wish to power back up. Additionally, Stigers said T-Mobile wishes to provide better data and information to its agency partners and will continue to actively look this year at “what data sources it can provide to agencies, so they have more information on the consumer.” The strategy, according to Stigers, helps collectors communicate more intellectually about the consumer’s history.

Data Illusion

Do you know where your data is?

According to Erin Jacobs, chief security officer and chief information officer at UCB Inc., the answer for ARM players is most likely not. In fact, it’s a primary problem for industry players across the country, stressed Jacobs during her presentation. “Data is constantly moving,” she said.

Although a culture change is needed, moving security up on business owners’ priority list is not an easy task either for an average shop. “Security doesn’t make money,” said Jacobs. “You have to convince [management] on how you will save money.”

Greater Transparency

Bill Kolz, COO of Equable Ascent Financial LLC, says his IT staff has been working on “automating everything” for the past year and a half in order to provide greater reporting tool access and insights. However, such a project will require constant revamping.

“The more we roll out the product, [the more] we believe it won’t ever be complete,” Kolz says. Already, however, the initiative is influencing the debt buyer’s operations. Prior to deploying the project, Kolz says Equable used to place portfolios into three different categories, while now, the tool indicates they should be set up in a quadrant.

Playing Friendly

Kolz, Equable’s COO, also revealed his shop is trying to up its communication with regulators in an attempt to hush regulators' growing cries against the ARM industry. “It’s amazing how many people don’t understand what we do,” said Kolz.

Additionally, Equable is working to launch a compliance web site to help consumers deal with their debt problems and questions, revealed Kolz. For example, perhaps a consumer thinks he qualifies for a financial hardship, suggests Kolz. He could visit the online venue to help address that. Despite the effort, he said his expectations for the site resolving many debt issues are not high.