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Transcript # 061110cb.l05

SECTION: Business

LENGTH: 448 words

HEADLINE: Maverick of the Morning: Time to Round Up Those Old Debts!, CNNfn

GUESTS: Jeff Cronrod

BYLINE: Allan Chernoff

 

BODY:
ALLAN CHERNOFF, CNNfn ANCHOR, MARKET CALL: While the economy does show signs of a rebound, many companies, especially small businesses, are still feeling the pinch. It's hard for those businesses which need every penny to let at least one debt go uncollected. That's where our "Maverick of the Morning" comes in. He is Jeff Cronrod, he's CEO of Fidelity Information Corporation. It helps small businesses through its service, OldDebts.com.

 

Jeff good morning to you.

 

JEFF CRONROD, CEO, FIDELITY INFORMATION: Good morning, Allan, how are you?

 

CHERNOFF: Very well. Jeff, tell us a little more about how this service works. You advertise it as a very low-cost way to collect debts.

 

CRONROD: OldDebts.com is a very efficient and economical way for a small or medium-sized business to recover their losses, their past due invoices. Customers are paying a little slower now, the way the economy is. And OldDebts.com gives them an opportunity to go after those slower paying customers, those past due invoices, and as checks (ph), that sort of thing.

 

CHERNOFF: How exactly does it work? How do you do it? All of a sudden, if I have a small business, go online and I what, send notes to my - to companies that owe me money?

 

CRONROD: OldDebts.com is fully automated. It's the only online fully automated collection service on the Internet. Essentially, registration is free. Once you go on, you can send a series of collection letters that come from us, a licensed collection agency. You can report to the credit bureaus, the three major bureaus. You can have us do courtesy calls to the debtors. Even pull a copy of a credit report on a consumer, all for a very low flat fee. It's real efficient, very economical, and it's an instant response. It's fully automated.

 

CHERNOFF: Do you find that debtors respond to this, though?

 

CRONROD: Yes, it's been remarkably successful. In fact, the letters that we use online are the same ones we use in our core business and they've been very successful. We've been using for about 12 years offline, so it's.

 

CHERNOFF: Jeff, what's the percentage return that small businesses do get when they use your service?

 

CRONROD: Well, we're finding on the online service, they're ranging anywhere from around 20 to about 28 percent response if they just use the letter package. If they choose to report to the credit bureaus on consumers over a longer period of time, it's much higher. So we give them that facility as well.

 

CHERNOFF: Jeff Cronrod, thank you very much for joining us.

 

CRONROD: Thank you Allan.

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