Take control of Customer Debt


When working together, we really value the contribution and material impact made by BFY's team, creating an ambitious and high achieving project environment whilst also passing on their expertise to the team. What pleases me most is the creation “one team” environment, which supports the delivery of one collective goal.
Customer Debt
Optimise your approach to customer debt
Customer debt is tricky to manage. A careful, but effective approach is needed to mitigate the risks of revenue loss, reputational damage, and regulatory action. Debt isn’t a new problem, but its impact is severely heightened in today’s climate, with the cost of living crisis forcing more and more customers into financial difficulty.
For suppliers, this is creating the perfect storm. Rising debt levels are detracting from bottom-line performance, while collections teams and processes are being stretched like never before, lacking the capabilities needed to take control of this extreme situation. Although there’s good reason to be concerned, it’s important to remember that you’re not powerless. A balance between cash collection and customer support is achievable, with the right direction on where and how to act.
At BFY, we can help you to enhance your approach to managing debt, building a high performing, risk-focussed collections process. Our expertise in this area is powerful and unique, leveraging industry insight and benchmarking data to realise transformational improvements.
We can help with:
- Diagnosing the root causes of your customer debt challenges
- Benchmarking your performance against industry best practice
- Identifying debt drivers and recognising opportunities through debt book analysis
- Optimising campaigns and collections through tactical action
- Enhancing your debt strategy with automation, systems, and specialist treatments
- Extracting value from uncollected debt by advising on a debt sale

BFY has supported the implementation of best practice debt book segmentation, allowing us to gain better insight around debt that is out of process and recommended actions needed to improve processes. They also helped us to develop agent level performance tracking, leading to improved call success rates.
Deliver lasting improvements through unique debt solutions
Different customer segments require unique debt solutions. Whether you’re looking to prevent new customers from entering the cycle, or engaging with vulnerable customers who are already deep within it, specific knowledge and skills should be applied to manage the situation effectively. With each of these unique scenarios playing out at once, you may feel like you can’t see the wood for the trees. This is where external insight can prove to be invaluable.
Our solutions are curated to cover the full scope of your debt challenges. We hold experience in delivering improvements at each stage of the debt cycle, combining insight with action to help you play to your strengths, and address your weaknesses. Our support is flexible, meaning you can engage our experts for immediate tactical improvements, or a full end-to-end debt transformation. We also make it our priority to set you up for future success. By embedding our knowledge within your operation, we equip you with the capabilities to continue managing debt effectively, long after you’ve worked with us.
Meet the team
Our Debt experts

Rachel Littlewood
Director
Rachel leads our Financial Optimisation work streams, working with leaders to improve profitability & cashflow
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Joseph Cooper
Manager
Joseph supports our Retail clients to improve their operational processes and business performance.
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Kev Brown
Manager
Kev leads our continuous improvement and lean transformations, working with leaders to deliver our Operational Excellence programme.
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Ed Breslin
Manager
Ed works with clients to improve their cash flow/revenue delivery, and leading the Commercial/Financial Modelling within our M&A/Transaction Advisory engagements.
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Case Studies
Celebrating our clients' success

Debt Taskforce delivers 10x ROI for large B2B Water supplier
A large B2B Water supplier was facing significant bad debt challenges, and required support with managing this. They recognised that their collections strategy was underperforming, seeking opportunities to optimise this and increase output.

Challenger supplier reduces debt book by ~£30m with improved processes and new campaigns
Challenger energy supplier facing ~£75m debt book increase due to inefficient processes, a lack of collection campaigns, and little progress towards Ofgem smart meter install targets.

Large energy retailer debt sale and capabilities creation for £20m cash benefit
We used our tried and tested Debt Sale Management Framework, helping our client to identify segments of debt it wanted to sell, segments it would consider selling, and segments it did not want to sell.

Latest News
Insight from Customer Debt experts

Dropping Prices - Rising Bills. Energy Price Cap Analysis.
Based on the latest update from Ofgem , the BFY Group team have modelled that prices will remain around £2,000 per year. The forecast £450 reduction in the headline rates won't be felt as a £450 saving customers pockets, this is because OFGEM have to articulate an annual value based on prices for a quarterly window.

Improving debt maturity in a challenging Water industry
In Water, B2B suppliers are facing a battle to be 'front of wallet', as the economic crisis continues to increase pressure on collections processes. To maintain stability, improvements to internal debt capabilities are essential.

Collections aren't working: What now?
Now more than ever, suppliers must adopt a fair and effective approach to customer debt. We've created a free guide to help with this, containing insight on improving your predelinquency strategy, and developing your collections process.
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