When Brian Renfro was brought on at Westlake Financial Services as the lender’s senior vice president of servicing, he was returning to a familiar space. He was expected to move fast and make changes to the way agents interact with delinquent account holders and to revamp the company’s dialer systems. Renfro served in the same role at the company from 2005 to 2007 before moving to Navient Corp. as director of operations with a focus on student loans.
“It was a trust factor,” he told Auto Finance News. “I had been in contact with Ian [Anderson, group president for Westlake] over the years, and I’ve worked with him before, so he understood what I bring to the table. He didn’t really ask me to come in and observe; he wanted me to come in and hit the ground running and pick out some of the things that we can quickly move upon.”
In four months on the job, he’s already made some changes at Westlake, which he detailed in an interview with AFN. The following are edited excerpts from the interview:
Auto Finance News: How has the company changed since you first joined back in 2005?
Brian Renfro: From a company standpoint we have obviously grown in size, but from a personal standpoint we don’t have the feeling of a company that has grown in size. We still move rather
swiftly and make changes as needed; they haven’t added the corporate red tape. The size hasn’t gone over the top, and we still move quickly and are able to make changes to adjust to the market.
AFN: What changes are you looking to bring to Westlake in this new role?
BR: I come from a big dialer background from my past experiences and have operated probably seven different dialers. I can use some of the dialer strategies I’ve learned along the way and bring that to the table here and make sure our strategies are successful, efficient, and compliant at the same time. We’re now using the auto dialer in some of the areas we weren’t using it, and using it some of the later delinquency buckets that we had gotten away from for whatever reason. We need to get back to using the dialer to get account penetration. Something else we did is we went to an agent-specific account ownership model in the later stages of delinquency, as opposed to working off of a preview-style scenario. We switched to an account queuing/account ownership model so that these guys can gain some knowledge about their accounts, understand each account and the borrower associated with it, and
figure out the best way to come to some sort of resolution.
AFN: What are your goals for the year?
BR: Decreasing delinquency, maintaining low delinquency, minimizing losses, and doing it all in a compliant way, as well as understanding the customer’s needs, and having a good relationship with the borrowers. We’re trying to improve the connection with our borrowers and having them understand the job we’re trying to do for them. Right now we’re seeing delinquencies come down
well under where we were last year and actually approaching 2015 numbers. We hear that delinquency is rising across the industry, but we’re not seeing that here just yet. We know that the good months are behind us and we’re headed into the tougher months, so we’re trying to shore up our strategies and make sure that we’re putting some new things in place. Everybody knows the winter months are tougher in our industry, so we’re trying to get everything ready.
