If you missed Tony Neff's session at the XP2 Educational Conference, here's the recap — what he covered, the philosophy behind it, and where collections is headed next.
Credit Unions Helping Credit Unions
XP2 Educational Conference 2026 | Thursday, June 25
Tony Neff has spent more than 20 years in the credit union industry, starting as a branch manager before building an internal collections department from scratch during the 2008 housing crisis. He's now VP of Collections at United Solutions, where he leads a team supporting 19 credit unions across the country, ranging from 40 million to 3.3 billion dollars in assets.
His session centered on what he calls the 4 C's: Continuity, Consistency, Compliance, and the CUSO philosophy of people helping people. Every part of how his team operates traces back to one of those four ideas.
That shows up first in what Tony calls White Glove Service — collection efforts customized to each credit union rather than the other way around, delivered through a direct core integration so there's no file transfer, no stale data, and no member PII moving between systems. Communication starts weekly during onboarding, then eases to a cadence each credit union is comfortable with. On the experience side, his four-person management team brings a combined 75-plus years in the industry, and every collector works on-site, with no near-shore or off-shore staff.
Tony was just as clear about what his team isn't. No auto-dialers, no pre-recorded voice, no pressure on credit unions to adopt USC's own processes. His team can work any account type except first mortgages, from 16 through 180 days past due, and the credit union decides exactly which loan types and stages USC handles.
The willingness and ability matrix
The tool Tony leans on most day to day is a simple willingness-and-ability matrix. Most members his team talks to, he estimates 80 to 90 percent, fall into "willing and able" or "willing and unable." The job isn't chasing a payment; it's figuring out which quadrant someone is in and responding accordingly, whether that means a loan workout, a payment skip, or simply time.
Roughly 80–90% of members Tony's team works with fall into the top row.
What's next in collections
Tony also walked through where delinquency trends are headed:
On technology, Tony's team uses an AI-based call analytics tool to score conversations for quality rather than tracking raw call volume, and he's exploring behavior-based predictive models that could flag at-risk members before they ever become delinquent. His take on AI is measured: it will absolutely reshape early-stage collections, but it won't replace the relationship-driven work his team does with members who are already struggling.
"What gets tracked gets done." — on measuring call quality over call volume
He closed by pointing to the six values written on the wall in his office: honesty, integrity, commitment, discipline, trust, and pride. For Tony, that's the real differentiator — not the technology, but the team applying it with care.
Want the full session, including his walkthrough of the collections services bundle and the Q&A on AI and licensing? It's all in the recording and transcript above.