Direct Credit Buyback

The brief

Direct Credit Buyback is a debt management platform built for a collection agency. Three groups use it and each sees a different system: collectors working accounts day to day, the creditor agencies whose debt is being worked, and us as administrators over the top. It is the largest project I have worked on, and I was on it for between one and a half and two years under contract with Alright Tech.

Importing at scale

Collection work starts with data, and the data arrives as spreadsheets. Imports run past 100,000 rows, and every agency formats theirs differently.

Two things made that workable. First, the mapping is dynamic: an importer points a column called name at the first_name field in the database and the system handles the rest, so no one has to reformat a file before uploading it. Second, the heavy lifting runs through a Python script rather than in PHP, which is what keeps an import of that size to a sensible wait. Calculations are applied during import rather than afterwards, so the records are usable the moment the run finishes.

Reaching people

A collection platform lives or dies on contact, so communication is built in rather than bolted on. Telnyx handles SMS and calling directly inside the system. Email and SMS templates are dynamic, and messages can be scheduled and sent across different connections rather than everything leaving from one route. Email verification runs on outgoing addresses, because time spent chasing an address that was never going to deliver is time wasted.

Pusher drives notifications, so collectors see what is happening as it happens instead of refreshing a list.

Documents

Accounts come with paperwork. Media upload runs through Uppy and handles more than a thousand PDF and Word documents, with each file assigned to the user it belongs to, so a collector opening an account has its documents already attached rather than sitting in a shared folder.

The rest

Around all of that sit role based permissions across the three groups, skip trace data handling, logging and audit trails, and reporting that shows administrators upload status, communication history and collector activity.

My role

I built this on my own: Laravel and React, the Python import tooling, the Telnyx and Pusher integrations, and the admin, collector and creditor interfaces. It ran for one and a half to two years under contract with Alright Tech, which is long enough that most of what I know about keeping a large system maintainable came out of this one.

See it working

The platform runs behind a login for the agency and its collectors, so there is no public page to browse. This walkthrough shows the system in use: Demo Link.