The Engine: Why I Built It

For 20 years, I watched the same scene repeat itself. Eight in the morning. A credit analyst sitting in front of three open screens: the ERP, an Excel file, a financial portal and a notebook on his desk. Searching. Copying. Calculating. Interpreting. By the time the analysis is ready, half the day is gone. By the time a decision is made, the customer has already missed another payment.

I lost count of how many times I sat next to people who knew exactly what to do, and could not get there fast enough. That feeling never left me.

Last year, I decided to do something about it. Not to write another framework. Not to deliver another training. To build.

I started from a belief that goes against most of what the industry still teaches: collection does not start when an invoice becomes overdue. It starts much earlier. With the first lead. With how a customer is selected, onboarded, understood, monitored. By the time someone is late paying you, the story has already been written. The Engine I built tries to read that story earlier.

Three layers, one flow. The first layer surfaces the risk: which customer needs attention, and why. The second layer turns the evidence into something a human can actually use: a 360° view, financial ratios in plain language, a clear next step. The third layer takes the action: routes the case, sends the email, escalates if needed, frees the senior collector to do what only a senior collector can do.

In the prototype, a single cycle dropped from around 200 manual hours to around 40. For a team of seven, the model showed an indicative annual gain of around €336,000. But the number is not what moved me. What moved me is that I had finally built something that protected the people doing the work.

The work of credit and collections in 2026 does not need more tools. It needs a connected way to read what the business already knows.