I have been working with technology since the 90s, back when having a website at all was the innovation. The promise back then was simple: technology makes things faster. Nobody talked about trust. Nobody had to. Today, in receivables management, speed is the easy part. The hard part is the first phone call. A person picks up, hears the word “debt,” and within seconds decides you are either legitimate or a scammer. No system I have seen, and I have seen a fair few, actually solves for that moment. That is the real gap.

What Already Exists

Here is what already exists in the industry. AI-backed systems can sort through thousands of debtor profiles and help decide who to engage, and how. Instead of treating every account the same, agencies can prioritise based on patterns in the data. Engagement outcomes get recorded too, not just whether someone paid, but how the conversation went, what worked, what did not. Over time, that becomes a real record of what actually helps someone move forward, not just a call log.

This is not nothing. Most people outside the industry assume debt collection still runs on spreadsheets and gut instinct. In parts of the industry, it still does. Having a system that learns from every interaction is a genuine step forward.

But it is not enough.

Prediction, Not Just Records

Recording what happened after the fact is useful. Predicting what will happen before it does is the actual leap. Right now, most systems, ours included, tell you what worked last time. What they do not yet do well is tell you what will work this time, before you make the call. The data to do this already exists. Every recorded engagement is a data point. String enough of them together and patterns emerge, which approach, which tone, which channel tends to work for which kind of situation. This is not science fiction. It is the same kind of thinking that powers recommendation engines everywhere else in our lives. The industry just has not built it properly for this use case yet.

I do not say this as a criticism. Building it properly means being careful, not just fast. Get the prediction wrong and you are not recommending the wrong movie, you are mishandling someone’s financial situation. That is exactly why it needs to be done well, and why it has not been done well yet.

The Bigger Problem Nobody Talks About

Here is something that will not get fixed by better software. Say we call someone about a genuine debt. They do not recognise the number, panic a little, and report us to the authorities as a scam. This happens more than people realise, and I understand exactly why. Scam calls are a real and constant threat in Malaysia, and people have learned, correctly, to be suspicious.

But there is no way for the people fighting scams, the police, the relevant government bodies, to quickly tell the difference between a fraudster and a licensed, regulated company doing legitimate work. There is no shared list, no verification system, nothing that connects legitimate businesses to the very people enforcing the law against fraud. So every call from a real company runs the same risk as a call from a criminal.

A verified whitelist would fix this. Licensed receivables companies, checked and confirmed, accessible to the people handling scam reports, so a report about a real company gets treated differently from day one. This is not a technology problem. The technology to build something like this is simple. It is a coordination problem, between industry and enforcement, that nobody has solved yet.

Feel Safe and Be Safe

None of this is about chasing the newest technology for its own sake. I have been doing this long enough to know that new is not the same as better. What actually matters is simple: people should be able to trust that when Newvest reaches out, it is legitimate, and they should be genuinely safe when they do business with us, not just reassured by good marketing. Our website is a start. Being reachable and transparent on social media is another. But the deeper work, better prediction, and a real link between legitimate industry and the people fighting fraud, is what will actually close the gap.

People need to feel safe. They also need to actually be safe. Those are two different things, and in this industry, we owe people both.

Junil Jayaratnam is Director of Operations and Technology at Newvest. He oversees the systems, processes, and technology infrastructure that support the group’s day-to-day operations.