From Monday March 19th until Wednesday March 21st the CRF Credit & Accounts Receivable Open Forum took place in Marina del Rey, California. A well visited event with over 200 participants from 140 different companies attended the CRF Forum to gain knowledge, network and share experience.
Although the weather outside was not as warm as it should be in LA, the first day of the conference warmed up after a few interesting sessions about alternative data sources and how to create automated workflows. After the last session of the day about small business fraud, the day ended with a networking cocktail reception on the roof of the hotel with a splendid view over LA.
The second day of the conference started with a panel discussion about “Where is bankruptcy headed and how could it be made better?”. The panel consisted of a group of attorneys. Shortly after, the next panel discussion started about “What every company that is accepting credit cards needs to know”: Behind the scenes of credit card processing as told by a processor, ISO, and a company that audits them. Both interesting discussion which resulted in good insights in the total process. In the afternoon Google was invited to talk about collection vendor evaluation & keeping high performance. During this session Mr. Steffens talked about how to select and manage your collections agency.
Wednesday was the last day of the conference and consisted of the Open Forum. Different questions were posted on all kinds of topics. OnGuard posted a question about scoring cards. About 60% of the attendees seemed to be using scoring cards. Internal elements such as gross margin, current volatility, DSO, past dues but also how many years a customer is your customer, were being used to combine with external information. These elements help to get to know your customer better and build a trust relationship with him. The longer he’s a customer to better your relationship should become over the years. The forum’s hottest topics were about small business fraud, Bankruptcy laws and everything you need to know about Credit Card payments.
Overall it was a good conference, with a large number of attendees from interesting companies. In August this year another Credit & Accounts Receivable Open Forum will take place. If you want more information, go to
http://crfonline.org/events/current.asp