Assessing Outsourced Service Teams to Ensure Compliance with Policies and Processes

By Roy Urrico

Vancouver, B.C.-based Integrated Financial Technologies (IFT), a provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions for lenders, announced the official launch of its Operational Assessment Service. The goal is to help financial institutions ensure the operational adherence of outsourced service vendors in areas including member engagement, contact center technology, workflows, interactive voice response (IVR) routing systems, collections performance, branding, reporting, and quality assurance.

This assessment service is available to credit unions, banks, lenders and collection agencies that engage offshore, virtual, or otherwise outsourced customer engagement staff. Each assessment reviews the processes and technologies used to adhere to data privacy requirements, regulatory statutes, best practices, and specific parameters detailed by each financial institution.

Tod Chisholm, president of IFT.

“Because both regulations and technologies evolve at a rapid pace, it is difficult for outsourced customer service teams to keep up with evolving practices. An outdated customer service environment not only reduces productivity and customer satisfaction, it potentially leaves a financial institution vulnerable to penalties for compliance violations,” Tod Chisholm, president of IFT, told Finopotamus.

Chisholm noted, “Our assessment process evaluates technology gaps, non-conforming procedures, and unproductive workflows that can severely hinder a financial institution’s success. Our goal is to suggest a path to operational excellence which will boost business outcomes, while allowing lenders to continue to benefit from the cost-effectiveness of outsourcing.”

The Launch of Assessments

Chisholm recalled the assessments program began over the past few years when some financial institutions asked IFT to perform several ad hoc assessments of lender call centers, compliance components, best practices and customer/member services. Those pilot assessments grew into the formalized September 2025 launch of Operational Assessment Service. “Something that we will do now on an ongoing basis.”

The credit union Operational Assessment Service program is comprised of:

• Evaluating the processes and technologies used by member service vendors.

• Reviewing outmoded service environments that impact productivity and member satisfaction, and potentially leaves the credit union vulnerable to compliance violations and penalties.

• Helping to ensure the operational adherence of outsourced member service vendors.

• A detailed report on the outsourced service center’s operational processes, along with recommendations addressing any non-compliance issues or inefficiencies.

Learning from the Assessments

As IFT has gone through these assessments, and with their core business as a BPO provider, the company noticed outsourcing providers, internally and externally, are contractually obligated to do certain things. Chisholm said, “Contracts might specify things like what items need to be written down; and where/how data needs to be stored, or if it needs to be stored in the United States, or in a particular way, or whether it needs to be accessible for seven years. So as a BPO provider, we will do side by side reviews where we are sitting with the actual people doing the work and take a look at how they do it.”

Chisholm continued his review of the assessment process. “When you actually meet with those providers and ask them to go through the audit trail, and try to get them to show you the documentation, you peel back the onion with an operational knowledge. And it is shocking how often it turns out that doing things according to the contract is not the case — the team is not doing what they are obligated to do on paper. They have agreed to do things a certain way in principle, but say they cannot do it that way in practice.”

The best example Chisholm gave involved a data security system and a BPO operator working with a couple of American portfolios, funded by U.S. companies. “The underlying lender got into financial trouble and was unable to operate, so they turned to their backup servicer, who was supposed to provide data security. That vendor was supposed to be looking at reports, and was contractually obligated to securely onboard the data. It turned out that vendor partner in question did not actually provide any data security, they were just a ‘servicer.’ They did not have any people of their own, and they did not have a call center. They were just a company that went out to market to identify vendors who were then supposed to do the data security onboarding. That happened even though the servicer signed a contract that obligated them to securely onboard the data.”

Working for Credit Unions

The Operational Assessment Service is very much dependent on the type of a lender, Chisholm noted. “We've done it for a multitude of users including banks and private companies in Canada and the U.S. but what we find is the credit unions (in the U.S. and Canada) are really a target market for us from a simple standpoint; they tend to need the most amount of help.” 

Chisholm admitted, “It is perpetually surprising to me, the poor quality that you run across doing those assessments. That is why the credit union, without the same level of resources of some of the large national banks, have a harder time figuring out if their providers are supporting them, or if the servicers they are using are best in class.”  

IFT would send in its Operational Assessment Service team, which consists of agents fully trained in financial services processes and a host of service-related industries, and adhere to strict data privacy and security mandates. “We send in a team of people (or virtually) that actually are managers and subject matter experts. Not consultants but actual people who are operators within our business who do these things to go in and do side-by-side looks at the systems in real time,” said Chisholm.

They do have a checklist that looks at elements such as:

• Data storage. The length of time, where it is being stored, ease of access, and how long it is being stored to meet regulatory requirements.

• Collections. Are you using the best practices? How are you contacting the customers? What tools are you using? Are you using text messaging? What platform are you using to provide it? “You would be shocked at the amount of times that it's really just an army of people doing things manually as opposed to using the most modern technology,” said Chisholm.

• Security. How privacy and systems security conform to regulatory compliance and operational best practices.

Keeping It to a Minimum

“The only thing I would say is it's minimally invasive,” said Chisholm. “I know people get concerned this is going to really take up a whole bunch of my team's time.” He maintained that the assessment usually takes days or a week.

Chisholm continued, “It is minimally expensive. We have not approached it as a large consulting firm. We have approached this as operators in the BPO space. if you bring in one of the large firms, it is seven figures, and maybe you are not even working with people that are experts in the space. In our case, you are working with actual people that do the actual work and actually provide these services. So, I, I think that is an important distinction.”

Among its pilot assessment users are several credit unions and some large equipment finance companies in Canada and the U.S. “I do find that credit unions, typically need the most amount of help relative to those types of situations,” said Chisholm.