I talk to agency operators every week. The ones who are growing right now have something in common, and it is not better dialers or more aggressive outreach cadences. It is that they stopped thinking about engagement as something they do to consumers and started thinking about it as something consumers do on their own terms.
One agency executive told me earlier this year that roughly 70% of their payment volume now runs through their consumer self-service portal. Not phone payments. Not agent-assisted transactions. Consumers resolving balances on their own time, through a portal they access from a link in a text message.
A year earlier, the same agency was processing most payments through agent-assisted calls and mailed payment stubs. The consumers did not change. The experience did.
The traditional engagement model in the ARM (Accounts Receivable Management) industry follows a fixed schedule. Letter at 30 days. Phone call at 45. Another letter at 60. Maybe a text somewhere in there if the agency has the infrastructure. The cadence is built around the agency's workflow, not around what the consumer is actually doing.
This worked when the phone was the only channel that mattered. It does not work now.
McKinsey reported in 2024 that 92% of U.S. consumers made some form of digital payment in the past year. That is an all-time high. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice found that U.S. consumers averaged 11 mobile payments per month in 2024, nearly triple the rate from 2018. Consumers under 25 use mobile phones for 45% of all their payments.
The data is clear. Consumers are already transacting digitally. They expect it. The question for agencies is whether the experience you offer matches that expectation, or whether you are sending people to a portal that asks them to create a username and password before they can see their balance.
Every step between intent and action is a drop-off point. Most agencies have no idea how many consumers they lose before the payment screen even loads.
The visibility gap compounds the problem. According to Tratta's 2026 Reality Check survey of 74 industry leaders, 44.6% of agents have zero visibility into a consumer's digital activity. They cannot see whether a consumer opened a link, visited the portal, or started a payment. And 32.4% of organizations have no follow-up process at all when a consumer abandons a digital payment. Consumers are showing intent, and most agencies are blind to it.
After years of working with agencies on their portal strategies, a few patterns stand out. The agencies with high engagement are not doing anything exotic. They are removing friction.
This is the single biggest driver. When a consumer receives an SMS or email with a link that takes them directly to their account, balance visible, payment options loaded, no account creation required, conversion rates jump.
The logic is simple. A consumer who is ready to resolve a balance should not have to prove who they are twice. The communication that brought them to the portal already established the connection. Making them re-authenticate is asking them to do work that technology should handle.
One agency tested authenticated links against their standard portal login flow. The difference was not marginal. In the words of one agency operator: "A game changer. Their ability to click on a link and it takes them directly to their account to pay." That agency now leads with digital communications and authenticated links across every outreach channel, including SMS campaigns that drive consumers directly to the portal.
An operations manager at a firm using our platform told me that getting consumers to set up their own payment arrangements without a phone call is a major goal. Every arrangement that requires a call costs agent time. Every arrangement a consumer sets up at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday is pure efficiency.
The key is configurable rules. The agency or creditor defines what plans are available based on balance ranges, account status, and client parameters. The consumer sees options and picks one. No negotiation. No hold time. No waiting until business hours.
This is not just a convenience play. It solves a real operational problem. One law firm manager described a pattern where consumers agree to a stipulation (a payment arrangement with specific legal terms) over the phone for $200 a month, then go online and set up post-dated payments for $150. "Mostly they do less." The phone conversation and the portal experience were disconnected. A portal that lets consumers self-serve within defined parameters closes that gap.
This still is not standard in our industry, even though it should be. If a payment portal is a desktop website that happens to render on mobile, where consumers are pinching and zooming to find the pay button, agencies are losing people who were ready to pay.
One agency operator described their previous portal experience bluntly: "It's not mobile optimized and you're constantly figuring out how to resize your screen and it gets annoying at some point."
The Federal Reserve numbers make this non-negotiable. Forty-five percent of payments for consumers under 25 happen on mobile. That percentage is climbing across every age group.
| Consumer Payment Channel | Trend (2018-2024) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile payments per month | ~4 to 11 (nearly 3x increase) | Federal Reserve, 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice |
| Consumers making digital payments | 78% to 92% | McKinsey, 2024 |
| Mobile share of payments (under 25) | N/A to 45% | Federal Reserve, 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice |
Portal engagement does not start at the portal. It starts with the outreach that drives a consumer there.
The agencies seeing the highest portal adoption are connecting their communication channels, SMS, email, even IVR (Interactive Voice Response), directly to authenticated portal pages.
One agency executive told me that after combining targeted text campaigns with their streamlined portal, daily collections volume went from a consistent $1,500-$2,000 range up to $5,000, $8,000, and $13,000 days. That same agency posted a 37% increase over their previous best month in January 2026. The executive checks the numbers every morning and said the jump from averaging $1,500-$2,000 per day to seeing $5,000-$13,000 days was driven by "text efforts on top of the ease of use with the portal. It's just really coming together."
That is not a software upgrade story. That is a strategy story. The portal was already there. What changed was how the agency moved consumers to it.
Our industry sometimes forgets that the person on the other end of a collections communication is making a decision. Engage, ignore, or dispute. That decision is shaped entirely by the experience they encounter.
A consumer who clicks a link and lands on a page where they can see their balance, review plan options, and resolve the account in three minutes is far more likely to follow through than one who hits a login screen and has to hunt for an account number on a letter they may have thrown away.
This is not about making collections "nicer." It is about reducing the gap between consumer intent and consumer action. When someone is ready to resolve a balance, any friction between that intention and the completed transaction is lost revenue.
The best-performing portals handle more than just payments. Some consumers want to pay immediately. Some want to review plan options. Some want to file a dispute. A portal that handles all three, with appropriate disclosures and audit trails for each, keeps consumers engaged instead of pushing them back to the phone or, worse, to a complaint filing.
Having a dispute function on the portal is not optional. Consumers are going to dispute whether they are on the phone with an agent or not. Giving them a compliant, documented way to do it through the portal reduces operational burden and creates an audit trail that protects the agency.
The agencies succeeding with engagement-driven strategies share a few traits.
They treat the portal as a revenue channel, not a feature checkbox. They measure portal conversion rates the way they measure agent talk-time or letter response rates. They know their numbers. (If you are evaluating collections software, this is the lens that matters.)
They invest in the consumer experience upstream. The portal only works if consumers get there. Campaign strategy, link personalization, and channel coordination are part of the portal conversation, not separate workstreams.
They think about compliance as architecture, not afterthought. Every consumer communication needs to meet FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) and Reg F (CFPB Regulation F, which defines communication frequency limits and disclosure requirements) standards. Every text needs proper opt-in under TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act). Every portal interaction needs an audit trail. The agencies doing this well build compliance into the technology layer rather than relying on individual agents to remember the rules.
And they do not force consumers into a single path. Flexibility in how a consumer can resolve their balance is not a concession. It is the strategy.
The ARM industry has spent decades optimizing outbound contact strategies. Dialers, skip tracing, letter campaigns, text and email automation. All of that work is designed to reach the consumer. But reaching them is only half the problem. The other half is what happens when they show up.
The data says consumers are ready to engage digitally. The question is whether your experience is ready for them.
Josh Allen is the CEO and co-founder of Tratta, a unified accounts receivable management platform serving collection agencies, law firms, and credit issuers. Learn more at tratta.io.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult qualified legal counsel for compliance guidance specific to your organization. Data cited from client experiences is anonymized. Results may vary. Past performance of Tratta customers does not guarantee future results.
