Earlier this month, RMA International held its annual conference. Rather than hear me talk about my experience and what I learned, I thought it would be better if you heard from your peers and colleagues from across the accounts receivable management industry about what they took away from the event. So I reached out to a number of attendees. Here is what they said.
Marian Sangalang, The Bureaus
The 2023 RMAI annual conference was absolute proof that we should expect conferences to look like they did before COVID. The attendance was definitely pre-COVID numbers and the original creditors were all in attendance, no more travel restrictions for them. It was obvious that business meetings were taking place everywhere in the Aria. Even though we had an amazing meeting table reserved in the RMAI Executive Lounge (shared with my team) I needed to locate other space for meetings and had to search for a location that had an open table to meet. To me, this is a great sign of things to come this year, as everywhere I went attendees were talking business. As always, RMAI provides incredibly informative education sessions throughout the conference and provides CLE credits as well as education credits for RMAI Certification. The sessions my team and I attended provided exactly what we were looking for-information that we can take back to our teams and deploy. Having the ability to receive the session presentations by texting (Thank you Solutions by Text) allowed for a seamless retrieval of information that we need to share internally with our teams. While I am looking forward to other industry conferences this year, RMAI’ s annual conference will definitely be hard to match.
Harry Strausser, Applied Innovation
The RMAI Conference this year demonstrated an enormous increase in the activity taking place in the debt buying and servicing industry. My biggest take away was the enthusiastic vision the industry is still very viable and growing. Prospects for the future are positive as demonstrated by the outstanding 1300 attendees.
Rozanne Andersen, Finvi
Clearly RMAI is thriving. Attendance exceeded 1,000 attendees and the session rooms were bursting at the seams. I personally found the networking opportunities and interactions in the Exhibit Hall to be extremely valuable and was pleased to see the attendees cling to every word until the end of each session. The biggest takeaway for me was learning about the powerful advocacy program RMAI drives at the federal and the state level. In short, RMAI is the place to be for creditors, debt buyers, collection agencies, and collection attorneys large and small.
Syntheia Nagel, Cedar Financial
I was really impressed with the collegial spirit of the RMAI conference. The conference united speakers, vendors, and attendees in the face of the ever changing regulations. The breaks were long enough to meet new people and exchange ideas on how to operationalize the information presented by the speakers.
The coolest thing I learned was digging into the details of the FTC Report on Dark Web Pattens. I skimmed the report in September, and didn’t take much action. As the panel dissected the report, I immediately began thinking about how I needed to inform and screen our clients for such practices, and educate our team members.
I left the conference with a HUGE ‘to do’ list.
Jamie Welsh, Harvest Strategy Group
It was the best RMA/DBA and overall conference I’ve attended. I felt the general tone of dialogue was about truly discussing tactical solutions as opposed to macro, tire kicking. This has a lot to do with the current conditions facing the consumer credit lifecycle. And where we all sit, we are primed to be extremely impacted. Hence the sense of need around the majority of the dialogue I had.
Patrick Lausen, Convergence Acquisitions
The annual conference is always an incredible event and the Aria is an amazing location. For me the value is in the conversations and idea sharing, being able to have conversations about industry topics learn and gain new insights or receive validation from other professionals and issues you maybe having is the best part for me. The Networking event they hosted to me provided the most value from being able to do those things. The conference ultimately provided positive outlook which helps to re-motivate me for the day to day grind.
Bill Marohn, Tobin & Marohn
I typically go to RMAi to network and visit clients and then as always I am mining for a nugget or two from the sessions. This conference continued to stress the importance of having a robust data security/privacy program appropriate for the scale and size of your operation. Similar to the initial development of your CMS how you protect and control your data will be a huge factor in how your business competes for future business.
Jack Gordon, WebRecon
The sheer number of attendees and their level of engagement was an encouraging sign for the future of our industry. It left me feeling optimistic.
Thank you all for the positive comments about the RMAI Annual Conference. I’m pleased that the conference met and exceeded expectations.
Knowing that business was being done in the literally hundreds of business meetings happening throughout the conference, that the education was valuable, that the exhibit hall had innovative products and services and that the networking events provided unique venues for meeting new and reconnecting with existing colleagues, tells me that our goals and vision for this conference were met.
Thank you to everyone who made this conference a success!
Thank you Mike for transmitting the sentiments of our colleagues. These reports are most encouraging and denote a positive upswing for our industry. We pride ourselves in having intelligent, resourceful professionals who consistently meet ever-evolving challenges with ingenuity and courage.
I look forward to joining everyone in the near future! (PS. I will always recall the amazing humongous shrimp at the first DBA conferences.)