Dan Kench

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Lead and develop the Collections, Recoveries, and Litigation functions, ensuring alignment with Arkle Finance’s strategic and regulatory objectives.
• Design and implement effective collections and recoveries strategies, including forbearance measures and litigation processes.
• Manage the performance of third-party agents and legal panel firms, ensuring high standards and value for money.

Operational Oversight

• Oversee day-to-day collections operations across all stages of delinquency, from early arrears through to post-default recoveries and debt sale strategies.
• Develop and refine customer contact strategies to maximise engagement, repayment, and rehabilitation of accounts in financial difficulty.
• Maintain effective MI and reporting to monitor team performance, portfolio health, and recovery outcomes.

Customer Outcomes & Vulnerable Customers

• Ensure that all customer interactions are compliant, fair, and empathetic — particularly where customers are experiencing financial hardship or present with vulnerabilities.
• Oversee the development and delivery of tailored forbearance options in line with FCA expectations.
• Promote a customer-centric culture throughout the department.

Governance & Compliance

• Ensure all activity is compliant with the FCA’s Conduct Rules, the Consumer Credit Act (for regulated agreements), and internal policies and procedures.
• Maintain strong controls and audit trails to evidence fair treatment of customers and effective asset safeguarding.
• Lead internal and external audits and regulatory reviews for the collections function.

Recoveries & Litigation

• Oversee litigation strategy and engagement with external legal partners on enforcement activity.
• Ensure robust and fair decision-making processes around termination, enforcement, and recovery.
• Support decision-making on write-offs, settlement agreements, and potential debt sale opportunities.

⦁ Provide leadership to the Collections Team by ensuring that appropriate departmental structures and service models are in place, monitoring and developing them as appropriate, and promoting a culture of treating customers fairly.
⦁ Responsible for the strategic direction of the department including meeting relevant KPI's/OKR's, resourcing and technology strategies, people and development, performance management and succession planning.
⦁ Maintain awareness in legislation, regulation and industry changes that may affect the Collections & Business Operations.
⦁ Active participation as a senior manager within the business working closely with other departments to share relevant data/information to improve the overall strategy of the department and business and work on debt prevention strategies.
⦁ Driving the on-going enhancements to policies and procedures in support of the department and customer experience and ensuring the team are clear in requirements to deliver on the department and SGEF strategy.
⦁ Development and delivery of the departments strategies including business plans, objectives, SLA’s, associated KPI’s, policies, processes and procedures.

⦁ Providing consultancy advice to Customer Services, Collections and Recovery functions.
⦁ Advising on all operational aspects of lending operations, who provide unsecured consumer loans.
⦁ Implementing training modules for new joiners business and implementing Quality Assurance programs.

• Leading our Customer Services, Collections and Recovery function utilising and developing our industry leading collections and recoveries function and strategy
• Manage all Group Collections including Consumer, Business, Bridging and Media portfolios
• Developed our Collections and Recoveries business plan to meet current and anticipated regulatory requirements
• Supporting other business areas and ensure that they are fully apprised of developments to ensure cross area alignment to achieve Business objectives
• Collections and Recoveries subject matter expert, proving presentations to internal stakeholders and external business partners
• To provide cross departmental leadership as a member of the Senior Management team and highlight all relevant major developments, in particular, those with Regulatory or Financial performance impact
• Build and manage our Quality Assurance framework, assessing all areas of customer communications to ensure good outcomes and alignment to Consumer Duty framework
• Cash Due Vs Cash Paid - consistently exceeding 140% target thresholds on a month to month basis
• Call service delivery - 95% of inbound calls answered within 15 seconds and call abandonment limited to less than 1.5% of all calls received.
• Manage external supplier relationships and in particular, debt sales and serving arrangement for spot and forward flow transactions

• To assume responsibility for the overall management of our Collections, Recoveries & Legal Departments, with the primary objective of managing the effective performance of our credit agreements, while also ensuring through effective training, policies and procedures, our customers are treated fairly and professionally
• To manage the three departments to ensure that performance targets are met, and the motivation of the department is maintained
• Minimise write offs and provisions, maximise net recoveries
• Ensure through training, policies and procedures and installing an appropriate culture, our customers are treated fairly and professionally
• Utilise systems to achieve efficiencies and improved performance
• Recruit & appraise existing employees and install a fair working culture that rewards performance, effort and ambition
• Approve legal expenditure / Approve write off accounts
• Portfolio Acquisitions including due diligence
• Prepare monthly management information and report to the Board in the agreed form (including presentations).

• To manage the credit control Department (Business Finance & Consumer Finance Divisions including Asset/Equipment remarketing) so as to minimise write off's and provisions, maximise recoveries
• Organise the department effectively, plan system changes, update and amend procedures and use recommendations to enhance in house systems to improve collection productivity
• Maintain the arrears levels of the departments to the agreed percentages
• Ensure that members of the department are adequately trained, managed and compliant with company procedures
• Provide a monthly departmental report which is included in the monthly board pack
• Benchmark costs
• Recruit new members of the department

• To minimise loss to the Group and maximise recoveries through effective credit control techniques on agreements up to 5 months in arrears
• Make suitably frequent contact by telephone or letter with customers which may involve negotiation and decisions on future action, in order to collect overdue instalments
• Where appropriate instruct repossession agents, debt collectors and trace agents and maintain a record of when they were instructed and what action they were asked to take
• Draft and file legal proceedings and follow through to enforce judgements within 7 days on non-payment in accordance with the judgement
• Complete all necessary paperwork for legal or write-off action.

• Arrears collections by telephone, letter and fax
• Ensure to action minimum of 60 agreements on a daily basis
• Liaise on arrears strategies with company directors and line manager
• Monitor repossessions of assets.

• Back office support
• International Cash Management (Swift / Chaps payments)
• Working in a small team (dealing with blue chip companies including ICI and high net worth individuals)