Balancing the Books: Protecting Customer Relationships While Maximizing Asset Recovery

Protecting a portfolio’s bottom line in the current asset-based lending market means more than just knowing the raw numbers, but understanding how to handle customer relationships efficiently and effectively through multiple scenarios.

Maintaining customer trust—while retaining the ability to safely and quickly recover assets—requires a delicate balance when it comes to communication, strategies, and technologies that can be called upon as needed.

Asset Compliant Solutions has seen it all over the past two decades of providing advice and services for lenders. Our guidance, rooted in real-life experience, gives actionable insights that simultaneously protect portfolios while fostering client relationships.

The Importance of Protecting Customer Relationships

 We view our clients as strategic partners whose interests we promote and protect in every way we can. After all, keepinging a borrower customer is usually more effective  than having to find, capture, and onboard a new one.

For lenders, there’s immediate and long-term value in fostering positive relationships with customers such as:

  • Repeat and referral business
  • Ease of working with familiar customers
  • Established communication channels
  • Shared industry insights
  • Reputational benefits


Borrowers remember how lenders act during times of tension.Those who handle issues like late payments and defaulting accounts with poise, honesty, and professionalism stand to benefit greatly.

Efficient and Effective the Asset Recovery Process

As a last measure, asset recovery sometimes becomes the next step to curing accounts. When that happens, we employ proven strategies to ensure the process is handled  speedily and with integrity.

Lenders need assurance that their collateral’s location is identified and that it can be recovered without issue when necessary.

We have learned a lot in our 25+ years helping asset-based lenders prosper., We advise implementing the following strategies before the recovery process formally begins. This both protects the relationship and dramatically increases the likelihood of successful asset recovery should it become necessary:

  • Automating reminders, follow-up emails, calls
  • Communicate a clear timeline of actions if agreements are left unmet
  • Leveraging skip tracing technology to confirm asset location

If asset recovery becomes necessary, always look to accelerate the process so that it can be completed in as timely a manner as possible. We use the following strategies and advise others to:

  • Offer alternate payment plans or routes to cure the account
  • Empower their collection team with resources 
  • Empathetic, clear communication with non-performing accounts on proceedings
  • Strict contractual and local compliance adherence through the recovery process
  • Track recovery progress to verify location, condition, and movement

By using these strategies before and during the collection process, the lender and the borrower protect their reputation and bottom line. 

Balanced Solutions of All Shapes and Sizes

Every client has a unique set of potential advantages and challenges, which must be considered to understand how best to cultivate the relationship. 

At ACS, the solutions we build for clients fit their precise needs, so they know their physical assets, bottom line, and brand reputation are accounted for within their portfolio’s plan and well protected.