The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has finally announced their final ruling on the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA). Seven years and 650-pages later, the bureau confirms that digital communication channels, like email and text, are allowed to be used in debt collections, officially beginning November 2021.
What is Regulation F?
Regulation F is the ruling that gave collectors like you the green light to modernize their outreach programs outside of the traditional cold calling and direct mail. Today, collectors are now able to reach consumers through additional channels like email, phone, text messaging, and social media. With new, innovative ways to reach consumers means limiting traditional avenues to protect the consumer.
How does Regulation F work?
Collectors can reach consumers through email, phone, text messaging, and social media but there are restrictions around how often someone can be contacted.
They are limited to how often they can reach a consumer over the phone. Collectors are not allowed to attempt to call more than seven times within a seven-day period regarding a specific debt notice. However, it’s important to know that this excludes texting, email, and social media.
The rule states, “A debt collector is presumed to violate federal law if the debt collector places telephone calls to a particular person in connection with the collection of a particular debt more than seven times within seven consecutive days or within seven consecutive days of having had a telephone conversation about the debt.”
Enabling digital channels gives consumers more control over how often and what means debt collectors can communicate. For instance, electronic communication needs to offer the consumer an easy way to opt-out of that channel’s communication for the specific email address or phone number and they can use that as their medium to place a cease communication request or notify the debt collector that they refuse payment. Of course, misuse or unfair use of the digital channels can result in consequences or more for the collector leveraging digital communication—continuing to protect the person who owes.
This is a huge step toward innovative communication for collections agencies. In turn, the use of email could improve deliverability of notices, resulting in more streamlined operations and a better overall experience for consumers.
Experian is excited to help you with your digital collections strategy
In addition to Experian’s skip tracing and data modeling tools. Experian’s email append and validation software can ensure collectors have the right party contact email data contact to reach the right consumers effectively and efficiently.
Given the recent release of Regulation F, it’s not surprising if collectors are new to email data. Therefore, there may be an incomplete email field in the consumer database. This is where our email append and verification services can complete and correct any blank or existing fields for each record.
How Experian's email append and verification work
- Match against a growing database of 1.6 billion unique consumer emails and append up to 6 emails per exact consumer match. Our services can also be fine-tuned to append what is considered the “best” email, which factors in when the email was created and the frequency of its use.
- Determine which emails on file are actively accepting mail, helping to narrow down which are viable to mail to while minimizing bounces and avoiding IP blacklists.
- Identify which emails are personal or business addresses to ensure the collector adheres to third-party disclosures.
- Collectively, these services provide additional insight and utility to consumer emails, supporting a digital collections strategy.
As data quality leaders, we have more than 20 years-experience helping businesses communicate successfully through email. Learn more about how our email verification and append can help you.
The CFPB Regulation F ruling on digital communications for debt collections has paved the way for a new dimension to the collections industry. With clear cost-benefits to incorporating email, text messaging, and social media into the outreach cycle, collectors can be in a position to execute effectively. With accurate and valid email addresses, collectors can confidently connect with consumers through a more popular channel that provides a better experience and improved collection rates.
Experian can help digitize your collections strategy today.
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