“Why Do We Make It Adversarial?” Rethinking Debt Collection

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything. I’m Mary Wisniewski, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large and host of the show that explores early-stage ideas that could, if not already, shake up financial services.

On the show today is Gwyneth Borden, and she’s the CEO and founder of a company called Remynt.

I met her at the Reseda Summit in Michigan this year and was struck by her mission to rethink debt collection.

It’s not usually the problem entrepreneurs choose.

On the show today, we talk about rebranding debt collection, her personal story of debt, and Remynt’s work with credit unions to help make the repayment experience feel less shameful.

Here’s our conversation.

Welcome to Money Isn’t Everything.

It’s wonderful to have you on the show today.

Thank you so much.

I’m delighted to be on a podcast talking about money isn’t everything in a world where money is everything.

I know.

It’s both things.

I’ll tell you a little bit of the backdrop for that name.

Banks and credit unions are always saying, “Hey, we don’t want to be the dumb pipes.”

So I like to explore anything other than just parking the money.

But also, I care a lot about financial health.

What you just said sets us up well for the conversation we’re about to dig into, which is debt collection.

But I just wanted to back up a little minute.

Back up a little minute.

We haven’t even had a minute.

So I’m just setting the stage right now.

I caught your demo at the Reseda Summit, which was in Michigan in September.

I was like, “Oh, okay. This is really interesting.”

It’s rethinking debt collection.

Also, you’re doing work with credit unions, and we’ll definitely explore more of that.

But I wanted to start with getting to this rebranding debt collection.

I took a note here, and I just want to make sure I wrote it down right.

You’re using the phrase “empowering financial freedom” to describe collecting debt.

Let’s talk about, what’s the need for rebranding debt collection?

Yeah.

I mean, I think in general, nobody wants to be in debt, and no one wants to be in a situation of bad debt.

Bad things happen to good people, and people find themselves behind.

Maybe they lose a job.

They get sick.

Something goes wrong.

Or maybe they’re just overspending a bit, and something happens and they kind of just are, you know, in that sort of place.

But I think that debt collection has always been about fear and shame tactics.

This notion of, you’re a bad person because you are in debt.

Fear and shame is not a good place for people to behave from.

Money is much more complicated than just, I make this amount of money and I spend this amount of money, or that I should save and invest.

If you ask people the basic things that they should do, they would say, “Oh, I should save for a rainy day or have an emergency fund. I should invest in my retirement. I should pay all my bills on time and not carry high-interest-rate debt.”

People would say all those things.

They’d say, “I should get assets like a house or other real estate that I could make money off of. I should invest in the stock market.”

Everyone knows this.

But the issue of money goes really far back to your upbringing and what you were raised with, what you were taught about money, or what you weren’t taught about money.

People think not talking about money is a good thing, but actually not talking about it is worse than even talking about it.

So I think when we talk about debt collection, you can’t not talk about the complicated relationship that people have with money.

If you’re in the process of trying to extract money from people who are in financial dire straits for whatever reason, fear and shame is not the way to do it.

Do you want people to act under duress, especially if you ever want to reclaim that member or customer in the future?

It isn’t.

Nor is it the way that people best respond.

So I think when people think of debt collection, unfortunately because of a lot of bad actors, lawsuits, litigation, threats, intimidation, and things that have happened, it has a very bad name.

It’s a highly regulated space as a consequence.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, right?

Why do we make it adversarial?

Yes, there are some people who don’t want to do the right thing, but that’s a really small percentage of people.

Most people are really stuck in a situation that they are not sure how to get out of, and they’re overwhelmed.

That is something we forget about.

So I think debt collection really is about going deep back to the human experience.

There are two things that people need.

They need health or money.

If you’re lacking one or both of those things, it’s very difficult.

I think that people lose sight of that in the process of debt collection.

Debt collection is necessary.

As much as I personally, even as somebody who chose to start a company in the space, I don’t love debt collection.

But I love that we have a financial system that lends to people and gives opportunities for people to build assets and wealth.

In order for that to happen, people need to pay their debts, or else everyone pays more or lending doesn’t happen.

That’s what happens when you have higher delinquencies.

So debt collection, unfortunately, is a necessary evil of our financial system in order to make sure that people do repay their debts and people can lend to others.

But it doesn’t have to be a negative thing.

It can be a positive thing in helping people rebuild their lives.

It’s such a curious thing.

You don’t often hear a founder say, “Hey, I’m redoing debt collection.”

What pulled you into working on solving this particular problem?

Yeah.

I mean, I think I had my struggles with credit and debt, falling behind, not making enough money, working in high-cost areas, and choosing a career that did not necessarily support living in the places I lived.

I didn’t have a trust fund.

I didn’t come from rich parents.

I think I didn’t really understand how to manage my money, quite frankly, and I fell behind.

I remember the fear and shame and the things that people said to me.

“Borrow money from your family.”

Do all these sorts of things.

What if you don’t have a family to borrow money from?

People make you feel bad, and you feel so much shame, and you’re working to fix it.

When you’re in the process of fixing it, it’s not like people are particularly nice to you.

But you get through it.

Then you realize that your credit’s shot, and it’s really hard to rebuild.

The only options, if you’re in the credit markets, are super-high-interest-rate predatory products that are waiting to be right there to basically re-trap you in the cycle of debt.

So when I thought about my personal experience, how hard it was climbing out and rebuilding, and how I feel like there’s a vacuum in how we do things in the United States in the sense of, we do a great job of punishing people, but we do a terrible job of preventing things from happening, helping people along the way, or rehabilitating people.

The whole idea of helping people repay and rebuild is something that I felt was missing, something that would have benefited my experience and something I wanted to share with others in the world.

I also saw that debt collection still hasn’t evolved.

Primarily, most credit unions are still having people call people on the phone about their debt in a world where no one answers their phone anymore.

So I saw an opportunity for innovation and to help credit unions because they do care about their members.

They care about financial wellness, and they are really the backbone of providing financial services to populations of people that maybe larger banks would ignore.

Yeah.

This is something that I think is so worth putting an exclamation mark on, and that’s just how old-school debt collection techniques have been, largely because of regulation, at least in the past.

Because I remember for a long time, you couldn’t even text somebody.

So to your point, it’s phone calls.

I just can’t even imagine that experience, or someone picking up, or that getting solved.

Why do you think that’s still happening?

Well, there are a couple things.

If you call enough, you might actually get the person.

There are older members or consumers who do answer the phone or have landlines still.

There was another collections company that quoted something like 13% of collection calls are ever answered.

So it just gives you the idea of how few people answer those calls.

Our experience is that if someone answers a call and they realize who it is, they hang up.

They’re not like, “Yeah, let’s talk about this.”

Because the thing about it is this.

If someone had the money, they would be calling or paying, right?

Every once in a while, you might catch someone.

In the credit union environment, people do have relationships with their credit union and know the people there.

It can cut both ways.

On the one hand, they may want to have a conversation with Susie because Susie knows them really well and they want to give their sob story.

On the other hand, they might feel really embarrassed to talk to Susie, and they’re avoiding Susie.

So I think there’s a one-two punch of the fact that there are, in institutions like credit unions, personal experiences with their members, and they feel like they’ve always connected with them that way.

Why can’t they connect with them now?

They want to do that.

I think that’s part of the reason.

And two, I just think that there was a study done a couple years ago.

It’s funny because it did this before OpenAI and the whole explosion of AI everywhere.

But there was a study done in China that said that debt collection done with AI was inferior to debt collection done by humans because of the social pressure that humans provide in that situation.

Now, that was a few years ago.

That’s before the launch of ChatGPT and the world loving and falling in love with and marrying AI or whatever.

So I think that the results would be different today because people do tend to prefer to engage with AI agents than actual people because there’s no judgment there.

At the end of the day, what we find about our platform being a self-cure platform, people tell us their wages are being garnished.

They tell us they have multiple loans.

They tell us things that they probably wouldn’t want to discuss, but they’re willing to put it in a digital form.

I think that’s really interesting.

You’re highlighting what sets you apart.

I want to get a bit into how you let people in debt set up different arrangements for the schedule of payment, and also more on building the credit score.

Because I did not realize this until recently, actually until your presentation, your demo, that just because you’re paying off debt does not necessarily mean you’re improving your credit score.

It’s a separate thing, except for certain models.

So we can start there or with the digital payments.

Yeah.

I mean, there are two levels.

What happens is when you get into severe delinquency, a lot of it depends on the credit union or the financial institution.

Some people cut you off as early as 45 days.

Some people cut you off as late as 180 days.

But the point is, at some point, your account is often closed when you have nonpayment.

Nonpayment isn’t just, I owe $100 and I didn’t pay $100.

It could be, I owe $100, but I paid $50.

I still haven’t paid that $100, so I’m still considered delinquent even though I’ve been making a payment because I haven’t satisfied at least what the amount due is.

So my credit score is actually showing every month in a negative fashion that I am, if it’s still being reported, actually still delinquent.

Once you get to a certain point where your account is closed, there’s no way to build credit on that account because that’s a closed account.

Credit scores are based on open accounts and utilization.

Most people who get into the collection stage, especially the late stage and the charge-off stage, those accounts are no longer open.

So repaying the debt won’t rebuild their credit score in any way.

In fact, a lot of third-party debt collectors actually open a debt collection tradeline, which is super negative on your credit report, to show that you have this debt.

Everyone knows now.

People Google it.

They’re on TikTok.

Everyone knows that repaying past-due bad debt won’t rebuild their credit score.

It really decreases the incentive to do so.

People would rather look elsewhere, whether it’s debt settlement or credit repair, for rebuilding that.

So we felt like, listen, why not enable people to build credit in that process?

Because the number one thing before we got started, when we would survey people in this situation with charged-off debt specifically, the number one reason people said that they would repay their debt is to rebuild their credit.

Because that’s the one thing that you need.

Your credit score is like a report card that follows you throughout your entire life.

If you ever want to borrow for any reason, or get an apartment, or get a car, or even car insurance, credit scores really matter.

What often happens is the people who can afford the least pay the most because they have a lower credit score.

The credit score that you have determines how large of an interest rate you’re going to pay on a home, on a car.

I didn’t even realize until I started doing this work that you can get a 29% interest rate on a car loan, which is absolutely absurd.

Yeah.

I know.

It’s crazy.

The actuarial models have figured out that most of those people are going to default, but because they charge them so much interest, they make their money anyway.

It’s really bad for the customer, really bad for the member.

Credit unions don’t do that because they’ve capped interest rates, but other lenders do.

The other thing that’s changed in our world today is that there is such a proliferation of online lenders.

There’s never been an easier time to get a same-day loan online as there ever has been.

For non-credit union lenders, people know how to get around the usury interest rates.

There are interest rates that vary for usury.

Usually payday loans have a certain cap because they’re payday loans.

Larger loans have a certain cap.

But there’s this sweet spot between like $750 and about $1,999 that usually there isn’t a cap.

So you can see people giving loans for 700%, 800%, 900% interest rates.

For people who don’t have an emergency fund and they need to fix their car today to get to work, but they can find this lender that will give them the money they need the same day, they will often sign up for these products not realizing that they’re going to pay six times, 10 times whatever they borrowed to get that money.

But they have an imminent need that they need to address.

That is the thing around the credit because those people have bad credit.

So they also have no other choices but to take those loans.

That’s why the credit building is so important.

Because when people have poor scores, when they do have borrowing needs, their only options are to use more predatory products, which only gets them deeper in debt and worse off rather than better off.

Gwyneth, at the top of the call, you were mentioning that people are dealing with shame often tied to debt collection.

I guess it’s kind of getting me curious, what is your first interaction with someone that you’re hoping to collect debt from?

What’s the tone?

What’s the voice?

What does it resemble?

We are like, you know, we are your trusted partner.

We want to help you achieve financial freedom.

So our introduction is like, “Hey, you’re lucky because we’re working with your creditor or credit union XYZ to work with Remynt.”

Remynt is different because you can repay and rebuild.

We have all these great benefits, personal financial management tools, financial therapist calls.

We actually have the ability to set your own custom payment plan based upon your own payment capability.

You can indicate a hardship.

The whole idea is that we want to enable people, and we talk about how we’re enabling you to get on your path to financial freedom by making it easy for you to take that first step.

We know that you best understand your financial situation.

So when someone else tries to tell you that you need to pay $100 a month or whatever, they don’t know.

They don’t know about all your expenses.

Not every expense is on a credit report.

If you’re paying for childcare or private school, or even healthcare things, they don’t always show up in your credit report.

So nobody really knows what your expenses are.

To give the agency back to the consumer or the member, that’s what we communicate in that first correspondence.

What’s really amazing is that we actually get thumbs up and positive responses from people because generally, when someone has one debt in arrears, they have multiple debts in arrears.

It’s usually not just one, especially a few months in.

So people know what other people are saying or how they’re treating them, and they’re so happy to hear from us.

Our content is full of financial literacy, personalization, some sort of fun and irreverent stuff, and then memes and all the rest.

We’re trying to educate people, but also meet them where they are and really try to take into consideration what they’re thinking about.

Because getting out of debt isn’t the activity everyone’s excited to do.

It’s what that getting out of debt gets them to.

Is it a new car?

Is it going back to school?

Is it buying a house?

Is it being able to invest?

It is a means to an end.

People get out of debt for a reason, and it’s usually to move to another stage in their life.

So we’re really talking about that.

Where is it that you want to be that getting out of debt will get you to?

It’s not about just the immediacy of that.

Because let’s face it, if you get a mortgage, you’re going to be in debt for a good portion of your life.

If you have student loans, not all debt is bad and not all debt needs to be resolved immediately.

High-interest-rate debt absolutely should and needs to be.

But those other kinds of debt are things that we live with and we acknowledge can help us in our wealth-building journey.

So for us, it’s really about acknowledging that there’s the good debt that you want to acquire to help grow your wealth and opportunity.

It’s the bad debt that you need to resolve so that you can get there.

You said the magic words, financial therapist.

I found out about financial therapy, I’d say maybe a year or two ago.

I believe Cash App hired someone to be their financial therapist.

But I’d still say it’s a really underplayed area of financial technology products.

I’m really fascinated by it because it’s also sort of an acknowledgement of mental health and money issues often interacting.

Tell me, how are you using financial therapists?

Are people using them?

Tell me more about it.

We have a financial therapist who will join us for calls, and then we’ll offer opportunities for special sessions like dealing with unemployment and how to do that and all those sorts of workshops.

We’ll actually pay for our consumers to be able to take advantage of it.

But it’s this acknowledgement that money really is very personal, and it has more to do with your psychological, emotional effects.

We all are about safety and security.

All humans, all of our actions are about protecting that.

How we utilize money sometimes has to do with our fear of not belonging, our fear of being isolated or left alone.

There are a lot of things associated with money.

Sometimes it’s the way your parents fought about it or didn’t fight about it, or spent it or didn’t spend it.

All of those things leave an imprint from a very early age on us and what we think about money.

Again, how we behave with money sometimes is symptomatic of other psychological, emotional issues and less to do with money itself.

So that whole acknowledgement that you can’t just tell someone to make a budget and expect that to work for them.

There are triggers in your life of things that happen that make you behave a certain way sometimes.

Sometimes the trigger is feeling left out.

Everyone’s going to the Taylor Swift concert.

You don’t have any money, so you take out a buy now, pay later loan because you don’t want to miss out.

All your friends are going to be posting on social media and doing that.

That’s their fear of safety and not fitting in that you’re caring about.

Or maybe when you’re upset, you feel like you buy something as a financial reward to make yourself feel better.

There’s been a lot of research talking about, for example, when you swipe a credit card or spend on a credit card, there’s like a dopamine hit that affects people.

I feel it.

I can say for myself.

So we can’t divorce money from emotions.

It’s very complex.

When you know that and you acknowledge that, and you try to work on, how do people deal with that?

To know what their triggers are.

What is the thing that might make you spend money on a vacation you can’t afford, or a concert you can’t afford, or an outfit that you can’t afford?

What things might make you try to control people using money, providing it or not providing it?

There are all of those things.

So I think we want to think of money as so personal.

In the debt collection process, people forget about that.

It’s not just the simple, okay, I have this, I don’t have this.

It’s not an inanimate object.

It’s actually how we all live.

Having money can be great, terrible.

Not having money can be great, terrible.

There’s lots of research to talk about that.

But financial therapy really is about getting to the heart of those issues because what you might need to fix isn’t just how much money you make, but how you think about your money.

That’s why so many people, for example, there are those debt consolidation loans.

Most people who get a debt consolidation loan end up in just as much debt 18 months later.

These are not people in severe delinquency.

These are people with good credit scores that just happen to accumulate a lot of debt.

They get a debt consolidation loan to pay off that debt and to pay off all their credit cards.

Then the next thing you know, usually, like I said, a year later, they have just as much debt.

They start using their credit cards all over again.

It’s sort of like this constant thing of spending.

Right now, as the cracks are showing, people across all socioeconomic backgrounds are living paycheck to paycheck.

We live in a world where everything is a subscription.

Everything’s more expensive.

Our standard of living has increased.

What we consider to be convenient and unnecessary is costing us a lot more than those necessities used to.

So we’ve had lifestyle creep.

Part of it is psychological.

It is actually financial, things do cost more, but there’s a psychological component that you can’t ignore.

Granted, we’re not solving all people’s problems, but helping people at least understand what it is in them that might be, from a mental health standpoint or mindset standpoint, impacting how they spend and use money.

Well, I think that’s really fascinating.

I’m just going to switch to the one segment we have here, which is “That’s What You Said.”

It’s what you wrote, or someone wrote, it’s on your website.

I imagine it’s you, but it ties to what you’re just describing.

The language was how some of the lenders would describe people as deadbeats.

I personally have heard in the past lenders describe someone as financial terrorists in a very extreme, bizarre way of labeling it.

But what you wrote is, “It’s hard to build meaningful solutions when you have disdain for the consumers served.”

I just wanted to dig a little bit more into that because I do feel like that is such an important part.

Do you still feel like that is what’s happening largely if someone becomes...

Yes.

So what I would say is this.

As generations have changed, especially younger generations are definitely not putting up with people treating them poorly and all those sorts of things, things are changing.

But by and large, historically, people in collections see people who fall behind as deadbeats.

I once had an advisor say to me, we were talking about building this company, and he was like, “Listen, if you don’t sue people, you’re not going to do well.”

I’m like, “I’m sorry. I just don’t believe in suing people.”

I just don’t.

I feel like if you can really provide a way for people to self-cure and be able to do things, you don’t need to sue them.

Granted, there are going to be some people who don’t do that.

If you give them every possible opportunity, if you really exhausted all the opportunities and then they don’t do it, fine.

But I didn’t want to do that.

He actually said to me, “Some people just deserve to be sued.”

I remember thinking, “Oh my God, that’s not what I believe.”

It’s always very complicated with money things and trauma that people have related to money.

Maybe you’re suffering from cancer and you are trying to recover, and you’ve obviously fallen behind on a bunch of bills.

Now you have medical bills, and it’s overwhelming.

Maybe, yeah, sure, they should be in contact.

But in the grand scheme of what’s important to that person at that time, that’s not the most important thing.

I’ve heard over and over again in collections offices the deadbeat scenario.

I’ve gone to collections conferences where people talk about how they basically torture or treat people poorly, or freeze all of someone’s accounts, or how they have the power and they can do these things to these people.

It’s really interesting because when I go to a collections conference, and these are only credit union collections conferences, and people say these things, it’s like, note to self, unfortunately, they’re probably not going to be my partner because they don’t share the ethos that I have.

But for people who are legacy collections, they genuinely view poorly people who are behind.

They treat them as if everybody went to the Louis Vuitton store, spent all this money and didn’t want to pay it back, when that’s far from what the circumstance typically is.

I’m not saying there are no people that abuse the system.

Of course, there are people in everything.

But I do think that the industry, while I think newer entrants like myself are really focusing it in that direction, there’s still a lot of that legacy behavior of the fear, the shame, the manipulation.

The big issue right now is coerced debt, getting people to pay debt they don’t even owe because they feel like they’re under duress to do so.

I think with the way the world is going, the younger generation just doesn’t tolerate those sorts of messages or approaches.

I think that more people are realizing that’s not the way moving forward.

But historically, collections has come from that place of being angry or feeling betrayed.

I’ve talked to people in small credit unions who are like, “I told them not to. I tried to work with them on their car, and they still screwed us over.”

It’s like, listen, it’s not personal.

Let’s not take this personally.

If you take it personally, yeah, it’s very upsetting.

But it’s not personal.

Someone defaulting on a loan is not about you.

It’s about them and about something going on in their life.

So I do think that is something that is super intrinsic.

The other part of it is that in third-party collections, it is commission-based.

So there are quotas on a weekly, monthly basis for all of the collectors.

When people are very much incentivized by money, you think about a salesperson in general, not even a debt collector.

A salesperson in general.

They’re really aggressive.

They constantly flood you with requests and pepper you.

“Aren’t you interested?”

“Don’t you want to buy?”

Nonstop, right?

Turn that into now it’s a more adversarial relationship where that person’s like, the way I get my bonus is that you pay me.

So I need to figure out what to say to you to make you pay me.

More likely, I’m going to resort, sadly, to threats and intimidation than I am going to resort to being super nice to you because I probably don’t believe that being super nice to you is going to yield any results.

For some people, that’s true.

But the point is that the mentality a lot is very much like, these people are disposable and we don’t care about having a future relationship with them.

We only care about the short-term monetary gain of getting them to pay something.

That’s what we’re trying to change.

That’s different because we believe that you can actually strengthen your relationship, particularly within credit unions, with members by being there through their darkest days and working with people so they can get to the other side, as opposed to alienating them.

Yeah.

I would think that would be a better approach.

It’s something bizarre we have in common.

I used to go to debt collection conferences, but it was my beat once upon a time.

I know exactly what you’re saying also.

It was such a wild world out there.

I’m sure it still is.

I want to talk a little bit more about, all ages could be in debt, but do you find younger people are...

Yeah.

So it’s worst among Gen Z and millennials.

Many of them are saddled with student loan debt.

What’s really happened was the cost of college has obviously increased exponentially.

People didn’t have to pay during the pandemic.

There have been servicing changes.

So fully 20% of student loans are delinquent right now.

For a lot of millennials, during the pandemic people started getting cars.

People didn’t care about cars, then with the pandemic and people worried about traveling in groups, people started to buy cars.

By the time that people started to buy cars, the prices were going up and the interest rates were going up.

So there are a lot of people underwater on car loans that they got during the time after the supply chain issues.

Overall, charged-off debt, super-delinquent debt, is worse among Gen Z and millennials.

Then it gets a little better as you go up the generations.

Then you have a tick over 70 where things start to fall off a little bit.

A lot of that probably has to do with cognitive issues.

Financial services, usually you can identify up to 10 years ahead someone with cognitive decline because they start to show it in their finances.

But by and large, typically it is the youngest generation that usually struggles the most.

That’s also because of lack of information and knowledge.

Right now, Gen Z far and away is doing the worst.

Even though they have the least amount of actual debt, it’s high in proportion to their salaries and incomes.

A lot of them have struggled with graduating in a time where jobs were not plentiful.

Lots of people struggled to get jobs, had offers rescinded.

That’s because the economy changed really quickly.

Even with AI, what people are talking about, it’s more of an impact on entry-level jobs.

If AI can facilitate and is meant for people who can make decisions and can direct it, then people who have experience are going to win out over people who are just starting out.

Yeah.

I heard on the side where some larger corporations, their first interviews are just a bunch of bot conversations with people.

I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that is my worst nightmare.”

I feel so bad for people just getting their first jobs.

But Gwyneth, I have one last question for you.

Before I ask it, if someone wants to get in touch with you, how should they do that?

Any last thoughts on debt collection technology or something you’re really excited about in fintech right now?

Yeah.

No, I think what’s really exciting is that we live in a world where people become increasingly digital, and there’s such an opportunity to actually provide more for people a lot less expensively.

So many credit unions and others could actually better serve their members by being more digital in their approach and leveraging technologies like mine or digital interfaces on their own website.

Easier ways to pay.

It’s really kind of an exciting time because there’s never been more access to tools and opportunity out there.

But obviously it’s a crowded space.

So finding the right way to communicate that and reach people is exciting, the opportunity to do that.

I think AI, also in both lending and in collections, has the opportunity to provide new opportunities for people to get credit who might otherwise be overlooked, which I think is really exciting.

Also, provide insights.

We can start to do default prediction.

You can actually figure out people who look like they’re about to fall off the edge, and if we used early interventions instead, we could actually prevent people from getting in this place where they would need someone like us to reach out to them.

So I’m excited because I think the interesting thing about AI is that we actually have treasure troves of data that we can better utilize to help optimize outcomes for people and for financial institutions.

That’s really exciting.

For me, I really want to change debt collection.

I really want us to talk about credit recovery.

It’s not just about the falling-off point.

How do we help get people to the other side?

Financial institutions make money off of lending, and you need good people to lend to.

So it’s in your best interest that people can get through collections and learn the right lessons and actually be better prepared to not get more high-interest-rate debt, but actually to be able to borrow.

Then you have a broader pool of people that you can lend to, and even people who will come back to you because you were there during their harshest time.

So I think that’s what’s exciting, and we want to create credit recovery, I like to say, as an industry that doesn’t exist today.

In terms of getting in touch with me, our website is GetRemynt.com, like get reminted to a new financial future, like a play on the word mint.

People can reach me at Gwyneth, just like Gwyneth Paltrow, same spelling, at GetRemynt.com.

Always interested in talking to and working with people.

In general, we are really about being problem solvers.

So we love to work with credit unions and really understand who their membership base is.

Same thing with community banks and any others, not necessarily only credit unions.

But we really seek to be a partner and understand whoever your constituency is.

We want to serve them well and represent you well so that you can maintain that relationship and only grow it from our actions.

And just my last question, what is the image on your phone’s lock screen?

Oh, right now it’s a picture of San Francisco from a direction looking backwards.

It’s really funny.

It’s a view that most people don’t see because I live in the southern part of the city.

So it’s a view from this park in my neighborhood.

It used to be my app, but then I decided to go with the city.

Well, I like both.

So, Gwyneth, thanks so much for being on the show today.

As you said, money isn’t everything, but also it is.

So thank you for joining me today.

Thank you.

Okay.

So one thing I learned is there’s a debt collection fintech startup that connects people with financial therapists.

I think that’s so cool because psychological issues can affect money stuff in really big ways.

If you enjoyed today’s Money Isn’t Everything episode, make sure to hit that follow button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you’re listening or watching.

I’ve got more great conversations coming your way, including up next, which will explore helping members and customers build their credit by paying their bills like rent and utilities rather than taking on more debt.

Catch you then.