Constant Energy Capital Management Inc., a financial technology company in Falmouth, has launched a software platform designed to speed hardship relief for financially stressed borrowers.
The software, for banks and non-bank consumer lenders, reduces incoming call volume and long wait times caused by COVID-19 financial hardships, according to a news release.
The program is designed to provide faster and more accurate decisions about payment deferrals, loan modifications and other workouts.
“Over 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment against the backdrop of $16 trillion of consumer debt,” Constant CEO Catherine Powers said in the release. “In response to lost wages, bank and non-bank lenders have directed borrowers to call for payment relief options. With mortgage forbearance requests alone increasing by nearly 2,000%, the COVID-19 crisis has shone a spotlight on the lack of preparedness to support hardship relief requests.”
Constant’s platform evaluates a borrower’s real-time financial situation and provides repayment options and, when appropriate, loan modifications in a matter of minutes, without human intervention.
“Whether a lender or servicer is offering to skip payments or a more complex hardship solution, that effort can take weeks or months with the high volume of incoming requests for help,” Powers said. “However, our platform can do it in minutes by engaging with the borrower, evaluating real-time, customer-specific information and automatically creating relief options that solve the problem and encourage payment performance.”
The goal is to avoid the kind of problems caused during the 2008-09 mortgage crisis, when requests for financial leniency aged in queues for months, Carissa Robb, Constant’s president and COO, said in the release.
“Credit scores were damaged, customers were feeling defeated and their willingness to pay was lost,” Robb said. “Constant is changing this.”