Walk into most recovery operations and you find the same setup. Three to six collection agencies. A monthly file from each, in a different format. A vendor manager who reconciles all of it by hand in a spreadsheet that nobody else fully trusts.
That spreadsheet is the recovery operating system at a lot of large creditors. It is also the reason millions of dollars leak out of recovery programs every year, quietly, where nobody can point to the leak.
A better agency won’t fix it. Neither will a better spreadsheet. The fix is a different category of thing: software that orchestrates the agencies, paired with people who run the program inside it.
Software-only and services-only each leave money on the table
Buy a vendor management platform on its own and you own a new problem. The tool can route accounts and score agencies, but somebody still has to set the rules, work the disputes, run the agency reviews, and chase the reconciliations. Most teams don’t have that somebody, so the platform underperforms its own demo.
Hire a collection agency on its own and the opposite happens. Recovery improves, but you lose the line of sight. You see what the agency chooses to report, on the agency’s schedule, in the agency’s format. When the CFPB asks how you oversee third parties, “we trust our vendor” is not an answer that holds up.
The recovery operating system closes both gaps. TSI runs the software (DebtNext’s dPlat platform) and the services (a performance analyst, agency management, dispute resolution) as one engagement. The creditor keeps the controls and the visibility. TSI does the work.
60M+
Accounts managed on dPlat, processing 6M+ transactions a year representing about $1.5B in payments.
What “operating system” actually means here
An operating system sits underneath everything and decides what runs where. dPlat does that for recovery. Account data loads in any file format, gets distributed to the right agencies, and stays under one set of eyes for its whole lifecycle.
The Decision Engine places and recalls accounts on your business rules, not the agency’s. Add an agency to a treatment tier, change an allocation percentage, set a settlement threshold, and it takes effect without a developer ticket. High performers can be awarded more volume automatically. Underperformers get less. The system keeps score so the reallocation is defensible.
Disputes, media requests, and reconciliations live in the same place. Every interaction is recorded and auditable. That matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago, because the oversight bar didn’t move when federal enforcement went quiet.
THE COMPLIANCE ANGLE
CFPB Bulletin 2016-02 set five specific expectations for how creditors supervise third-party collectors, and the June 2023 interagency guidance reinforced them. A spreadsheet can’t defensibly document any of the five. A transactional system of record can.
The proof is in the recovery lift, not the feature list
Features are easy to claim. Recovery numbers are harder. A few from clients running the recovery operating system model with TSI:
PG&E ran its agency network through the platform and saw a 24% increase in collections and an $8.7M net-back gain. Entergy cut its recovery FTE load by 80% while pulling in a seven-figure recovery boost. Across the book, DebtNext holds a 99% client retention rate, with many clients past the decade mark.
Carri McQuerrey-Funk, SVP at Citizens Bank, put the implementation experience plainly: “That was the cleanest implementation of technology we’ve had in the collection and recovery space.”
24%
Increase in collections at PG&E, alongside an $8.7M net-back gain, after consolidating agency oversight on dPlat.
Why TSI can run both sides
Most vendors pick a lane. Software companies sell you the tool and wave at the services. Agencies sell you the labor and hide the data. TSI operates the full stack: ARM collection services, CX/BPO, Healthcare RCM, Loan Servicing, and the DebtNext platform that orchestrates recovery across all of it.
That mix means TSI knows what good agency performance looks like from the inside, because TSI is also an agency that gets measured on the same platform. The benchmark isn’t theoretical. It’s built from 200M+ consumer records on the services side and 60M+ accounts on the platform side.
One note worth saying out loud: creditors sometimes worry about giving a company that also collects a window into their full agency roster. DebtNext operated independently for 22 years before TSI acquired it in 2025, holds SOC 2 Type II certification, and maintains data access controls. If that question matters to your risk team, it’s a fair one to put on the table early.
Where to start
You don’t have to rebuild the whole program to test the model. The usual entry point is aged paper that incumbents already failed to collect, run through the platform so you can watch the scoring and the lift in real numbers before committing the full book.
If your recovery program still runs on a monthly file and a spreadsheet, that’s the gap. The recovery operating system is how creditors close it.