‘Smart Collection’ is Helping to Reshape the Payments Space

By W.B. King

In a concerted effort to get ahead of delinquency rates before costs rise, Smart Collection, from interface.ai, was released in mid-February. “Early-stage delinquency is becoming a sharper focus across the industry,” the San Francisco-based interface noted in a press release. “Credit unions reported total delinquency of 95 basis points in Q3 2025, and consumer credit data showed 30–59 days past due delinquencies rising to 1.13% in September 2025, nearing pre-pandemic levels – underscoring why earlier engagement and higher-quality outreach matter now more than ever.”

Founder and CEO of interface.ai, Srinivas Njay, stated that credit unions and community banks “win on relationships.” And he’s not new to the space—he provided related insights to Finopotamus in a 2021 guest editorial. Delinquency rates today, he said, continue to be where relationships are tested and where speed, empathy, and precision matter most.

“Smart Collections gives institutions a new kind of capability: an agent that can take action across channels, follow institution-defined policy guardrails, and consistently drive cures - while preserving member trust and creating a complete audit trail,” he shared.

Solution highlights include:

Outbound Voice AI (artificial intelligence) Agent that can place calls, verify identity (policy-gated), capture promise-to-pay, send payment links, and escalate to a human when needed.

Two-way SMS AI Agent that supports STOP/opt-out handling, payment link flows, intent detection (pay, dispute, hardship), and compliant cadence controls.

Two-way Email AI Agent with deliverability safeguards, templates, reply handling, and preference management.

Product-aware playbooks for the products most common in credit union/community bank portfolios:

• Negative balance / overdraft, overdraft line of credit.

• Credit card, auto/RV/boat, personal installment, personal LOC.

• Share/CD-secured credit builder loans.

• HELOC/home equity optional mortgage early-intervention workflow with timing gates and notices (where applicable).

  
  

With 99.99% uptime, more than 1.5 million conversations per day, and 500-plus million conversations to date, interface.ai provides a proven foundation for community-focused banking AI, Njay explained. The company’s BankGPT platform powers agentic AI across voice and digital channels and is trusted by close to 100 community financial institutions (FIs), he noted.

Becoming Enterprise Capabilities

While interface.ai’s list of financial institutions (FIs) is on the uptick, recent research from the Boston-based PYMNTS Intelligence, Critical Moment: The AI Imperative for Credit Unions, cites that credit unions have more interest in exploring similar solutions rather than adopting them, with only a fraction of the industry deploying. “AI stalls when the underlying conditions are not in place,” the Boston-based commerce and digital economy company stated. “Data quality, governance and system connectivity consistently emerge as the main constraints preventing pilots from becoming enterprise capabilities.”

From Njay’s stance, FIs want “more than a standalone collections workflow system, a digital self-cure portal, or a generic omni-channel messaging tool.” This was the impetus for Smart Collections. The AI agents, he added, work directly with native integration with cores, replacing standalone collection workflow systems, payment portals and SMS communication tools. The solution interfaces with Jack Henry, Corelation, FIS, Finastra, various Fiserv platforms, COCC, and Share One.

“Smart Collections is available immediately for pilots and phased rollouts, starting with early delinquency use cases across consumer products most common to credit unions and community banks,” the company stated. “Mortgage early-intervention workflows are available as an optional module.”