Business ProfileforAdvance Financial

This company has a pattern of complaint that alleges billing and collection issues. Specifically, consumers allege the business is charging too much interest. Additionally, one consumer alleged the business "lied to me about the interest policy in order to inflate my debt to where I would default and owe excessive interest." Consumers allege that payment terms were not identified in the beginning. Consumers report having made payments but, the payments are not applied. Consumers advise that they are harassed by the company for the payments that were not applied.

BBB reached out to the business on February 25, 2021 seeking their voluntary cooperation to eliminate the pattern of complaint. On March 8, 2021, the business provided the following steps they are taking in response to our request:

1. We will continue to review daily customer complaints and escalations leveraging the Complaint and Compliance committee that we have internally developed to identify operational and customer service deficiencies. At each meeting, at least one senior Customer Servicing leader and one senior Compliance leader will attend and will determine the immediate customer resolution, validate the issue leveraging internal and customer data points, collaborate to identify the root cause of the service defect, will develop a performance gap plan to address the root cause of the issue, and will implement the solution setting a performance lookback period to seek out feedback in order to validate if the performance improvement plan addressed eliminated the trend. Any new procedural or system improvements will be feedback for the Learning & Development team to help implement training curriculum improvements for Operations.

2. Advance Financial will executed monthly Complaint review sessions with at least 2 senior Customer Servicing leaders and the COO, as well as 1 senior Compliance leader, to monitor, identify, and address any new or recurring customer complaint trends that came up in the prior 30 day period. In the meeting, each complaint will be categorized by type and root cause reason and the team's goal will be to monitor the trend development and determine if the trend was sustained after action items were implemented or if it is a new trend, if there was evidence of said trend from the prior month's meeting, will analyze each complaint to determine root causes and call out any additional data points needed for analysis, validate if the performance gap addressed previously is still present and if adjustment to the business action items are needed, and implement new monitoring practices to ensure new action items are effective immediately.

3. Executive management team will meet quarterly to review the complaint categories, monthly performance, product and state segments, in order to help spot spikes and impact of action plans implemented previously. Executive leadership will validate business action item effectiveness, identify seasonal, macroeconomic, or industry wide impacts and circumstances that might have an impact on complaint trends, and will provide strategic change feedback around how effective prior plans were.