Retain / Save
Lending arrears hardship and forbearance save
A borrower just missed a payment, or paid part of one. The right conversation now keeps the account performing — and keeps the customer.
What it does
The window between a first missed payment and a formal collections case is where lending relationships are won or lost. Treat an early wobble as a debt to chase and a struggling borrower digs in, goes quiet, or rolls into hard arrears. The cost of doing nothing is an account that drifts toward charge-off and a customer who never comes back. The agent opens a supportive conversation at the first sign of strain — a missed or partial payment, an affordability signal — listens for the real situation, gathers income and expenditure where hardship is present, and routes to the right option (a payment holiday, a restructure, a forbearance arrangement) for a human to approve. The goal is to keep the account out of collections, inside Consumer-Duty and FCA expectations on treating customers in difficulty fairly.
How it works
- 1Trigger. an early-arrears or affordability signal fires from the loan servicing system — a missed or partial payment, a broken arrangement, or a pre-delinquency risk score — before the account reaches formal collections.
- 2Decision. the agent reads the account (balance, arrears state, payment history, prior arrangements) and the customer's memory, then chooses a supportive opener rather than a demand. Where the signals or the borrower's own words indicate hardship or vulnerability, it follows the hardship sub-procedure; a judge gates every contact against the Consumer-Duty policy first.
- 3Action. it opens the conversation on the borrower's channel — calm, non-judgmental, explaining where the account stands and that options exist — and, where hardship is present, gathers structured income and expenditure to size what the borrower can realistically afford.
- 4Follow-through. the agent assembles a recommended forbearance or restructure option and routes it to a human for approval; it never sets a binding hardship arrangement on its own. Vulnerability language (bereavement, illness, financial abuse) hands off to a specialist immediately, the interaction writes to the servicing audit trail, and saves are measured against a holdout.
Configuration
How the agent is wired for this use case.
partial_payment, payment_missed below the collections threshold, broken-arrangement, or a pre-delinquency risk score.- Loan servicing system · read balance, arrears state, payment history, and prior arrangements; write back the proposed and approved hardship outcome.
- Affordability / income-and-expenditure intake · gather structured income and outgoings to size an affordable arrangement.
- Forbearance / restructure engine · assemble the payment-holiday, term-extension, or reduced-payment option for human approval.
- Vulnerability-routing system · detect and route bereavement, illness, or financial-abuse language to a specialist team.
- Messaging channel · run the supportive conversation on the borrower's channel.
- CRM / servicing audit log · record every contact, disclosure, and arrangement.
What you need
The inputs this use case runs on. Your channels stay yours; the agent supplies the judgment.
Signals
early-arrears events (partial_payment, sub-threshold payment_missed), broken-arrangement flags, pre-delinquency risk scores, affordability indicators.
Data
balance and arrears state, payment and contact history, prior arrangements, hardship and vulnerability flags, consent and contact-window preferences, customer memory.
Guardrails
Consumer-Duty and FCA expectations on customers in difficulty encoded as policy — supportive framing, contact windows, frequency caps, required disclosures; hardship arrangements human-approved only; immediate vulnerability handoff; judge gating on every contact; a complete servicing audit trail; holdout assignment for honest save measurement.
Metrics it moves
- save-rateup: accounts kept performing through a supported arrangement instead of rolling into formal collections.
- recovered-revenueup: a realistic forbearance plan recovers more over time than an account that charges off.
- csatup: borrowers who are met with help at the first wobble stay, where pressure at that moment loses them.
Related use cases
Lending collections and promise-to-pay
the formal collections motion once an account is overdue
Borrower servicing self-service
everyday servicing where the same vulnerability routing applies
Failed-payment instant recovery
the payment-retry pattern this hardship variant deliberately diverges from
See it on your own customer journey
Bring one drop-off, one churn cliff, or one silent segment. We will show you what a proactive agent with memory and judgment does with it.
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