For lenders operating across markets, 2026 is consolidating around a familiar set of pressures: tighter economics, sharper supervision, and rising expectations for how credit issuers treat customers when money gets tight.
Collections technology still doesn’t get enough time on the executive agenda, but it should, because collections is where fair treatment, compliance, and cashflow meet. When systems are dated, risk doesn’t always show up as a headline issue. It shows up later as inconsistency, weak evidencing, and remediation you didn’t budget for.
We’re focusing on motor finance in the UK because it’s one of the clearest signals of where collections expectations are heading.
Markets move quickly, customers compare experiences across sectors, and regulators learn from each other. What starts as UK conduct expectations has a habit of becoming the benchmark elsewhere, and global providers need to standardise good practice while still localising execution.
At the same time, delinquency pressure is building across multiple consumer credit categories, and motor finance is rarely insulated for long. Legacy tech can’t keep up with changing customer behaviours and channel preferences.
When churn is high, clunky servicing and collections experiences don’t merely frustrate people. They damage trust at the moment it matters most, and as we all know, trust is difficult to win back once a customer feels they’ve been handled poorly.
The uncomfortable truth is “legacy” doesn’t only mean old. It means brittle, and brittle is another word for risky.
If teams need spreadsheets to run core processes, you’re living on workarounds. If every policy change needs a small army of specialists to implement and test, you’re stuck with long lead times and uneven execution.
When senior leaders ask for better visibility, faster strategy shifts, or cleaner management information (MI), the answer becomes “We can, but not quickly.” Customers don’t care why it’s slow. They only feel the delay and the inconsistency.
This brittleness becomes a conduct problem faster than many lenders expect. Regulators want outcomes, not intent.
In the UK, this translates into being able to demonstrate fair treatment, especially for customers in vulnerable circumstances. Lenders have to be able to prove decisions are appropriate, consistent, and monitored.
When your platform can’t reliably capture decision logic, channel history, customer context, and the “why” behind treatments, you end up compensating with manual controls and local fixes. These patches can keep the lights on, but they also increase operational risk, widen variability between agents and teams, and make it harder to answer the question that matters most: can you show your work?
AI can help if it’s implemented as part of the core workflow rather than bolted on as a set of point solutions.
Legacy platforms often force AI into the margins, meaning a chatbot here, a scoring tool there, a few narrow wins. These tools age quickly, and you can end up solving today’s problem while creating tomorrow’s integration and governance headaches.
Data access makes it worse. AI is only as useful as the breadth and quality of the customer picture it can see, and many legacy stacks still scatter this picture across systems, vendors, and teams. The result is technology that looks modern on the surface but operates with one eye closed.
You don’t need magic, you need a better base.
Start with orchestration: a central layer that connects origination, servicing, collections, and external data sources so you can manage customers consistently across channels and touchpoints.
Then prioritise platforms that are genuinely AI native, where intelligence sits inside the workflow, guiding next best actions at the moment of decision. This helps agents be consistent, improves quality assurance, and supports monitoring. It’s far better than analytics that live outside the process in dashboards that don’t change outcomes.
Just as important, give the business real control. Ops, risk, and compliance teams should be able to design, test, and adjust strategies without waiting behind an IT queue for every small change.
Cloud resilience matters as well. Modern systems can scale as volumes spike and can be monitored centrally, reducing downtime and firefighting.
Compliance by design is no longer a slogan. It’s the practical foundation for audit trails, role based access, clear decision logic, and reporting that supports internal governance as well as external scrutiny.
None of this requires a big bang rewrite. Most lenders start where pain is highest and measurement is clear: a portfolio, a segment, or a workflow.
They run new and old in parallel, prove impact, then expand. Confidence comes from results, not promises. Modern platforms built around APIs and standard integrations let you phase change at the pace your risk appetite allows.
Now, about the motor finance commissions issue. On the surface, it’s an originations problem, not a collections problem.
It’s also absolutely a collections and servicing technology problem in one critical way: it’s a mass, highly scrutinized customer outcomes exercise that requires speed, accuracy, consistency, and evidence. If you can’t find the right accounts, reconstruct decisions, explain outcomes, and communicate clearly across channels, you create a second wave of risk on top of the first.
This is why the FCA’s motor finance compensation scheme and the complaints handling timeline matter to collections leaders. Not because collections caused the issue, but because collections operations and platforms are often where high volume customer remediation gets executed, monitored, and evidenced at scale.
In UK motor finance, this backdrop makes the case for modernisation even more urgent. The FCA has said it expects to publish final rules for a motor finance compensation scheme before the end of March. The current pause on handling certain motor finance commission complaints is due to lift 31 May 2026.
These dates matter because they compress timelines and raise the bar for operational readiness. Lenders need systems that can adapt fast, keep treatment consistent, and evidence decisions without relying on heroic manual effort.
An inflexible collections stack limits what’s possible. The lenders pulling ahead will be those who can adjust strategies quickly, evidence fair outcomes with confidence, and support customers under pressure without burning out their best people.
This is hard to do on a platform built for a different era, and much easier when the platform fits the world you’re operating in now.
