| DCA | Debt collection agency: collects amounts owed to another party. |
| DCA placement vs write-off | Outsourcing to a DCA does not require a write-off. Many banks still place most contingent DCA volume after charge-off; the pack reflects that volume, not a universal rule. |
| Contingent collections / contingency fee | Creditor pays a percentage of recovered amounts (and sometimes pass-through costs), not only fixed effort fees. |
| First-party collections | Original creditor collects in its own name. |
| Third-party collections | External agency collects on behalf of the creditor; receivable usually still owned by creditor unless sold. |
| Debt buyer | Buys defaulted portfolios and collects for its own account. |
| Customer / borrower (data domain) | Reference grouping for IDs, PII, contacts, and vulnerability flags in integration design. Older specs sometimes labelled this domain Party. |
| Placement | Transfer of accounts to the DCA under contract with file feeds and rules. |
| Charge-off | In many banks, classification or trigger (non-performing, routing, stage reporting). Write-off is the accounting entry that reduces the loan asset. In practice the terms are often used interchangeably and may occur together on the same timeline. Neither term alone means collection must stop. Align to your policy. |
| Treatment / route | Planned path: channels, hardship, legal, closure. |
| Promise to pay (PTP) | Customer commitment to pay by a date. |
| Hardship | Difficulty meeting obligations; may trigger forbearance or referral per policy and regulation. |
| Spin down / vintage report | Cohort outcomes by referral month. |
| DLP / debt ledger purchase | Purchase of a debt portfolio; buyer often owns the receivable. |
| BPO (collections) | Outsourced process steps; may be per activity or FTE. |
| Intermediary | Third party that helps select, contract, place, recall, and report across a DCA panel. |
| Tier 1 / 2 / 3 | Informal placement vintage labels; define in your policy. |
| Gross vs net referrals | Gross: placed volume or value. Net: after adjustments. Critical for allocation scorecards. |
| SoT / SoR (system of record / Source of Record) | Many environments use the terms interchangeably in interface specs. The key point is CP accountability: which bank-owned system is authoritative for balance, payments, and outcomes for a given purpose, and how operational truth relates to financial (GL) truth. Not two competing truths: clear ownership per question. See Source of Record. |
| R1 / R2 | First and second external placement tiers in a two-step model. |
| Recall (CP-executed) | Stop-work instruction that ends a placement episode; CP authoritative. Distinct from a vendor’s request. |
| Recall request (RQT) | DCA asks CP to recall or extend; CP accepts or rejects. Timestamp and reason should be stored separately from actual recall. |
| Abandon | Terminal decision to stop pursuit, often economics or risk driven; governance and reason codes apply. See End states. |
| Forgiveness | Terminal decision often policy or remediation driven; may look like abandon in operations but approval trail differs. |
| Waiver | Waive part of debt or fees under authority; not always the same legal meaning as forgiveness in all jurisdictions. |
| COF (Control Orchestration Framework) | Framework that turns obligations into engineered execution: states, gates, clocks, trace. See COF for DCA. |
| State activation (COF) | Hardship, complaint, recall, or other states that switch obligations on or off in the model. |
| Prohibition gate (COF) | Engineered block on actions such as referral, demand, or default listing when rules forbid them. |
| Arbitration (COF) | Deterministic precedence when multiple protections overlap (for example hardship and complaint). |
| Buffer banding (COF) | Risk-weighted signals before breach; proactive intervention, not only calendar SLAs. |
| Decision trace (COF) | Replayable record of inputs, rule version, and outcome for blocked or escalated actions. |
| OKR | Objectives and Key Results: programme outcomes and measurable results. Complements SLAs and Layer 3 reporting. |
| KPI | Key performance indicator: operational measure. Often feeds SLAs and OKRs when definitions match. |
| SLA | Service-level agreement: contractual minimums between CP and DCA. |
| NPV (Net Present Value) | Present value of future cash flows minus costs, discounted at a hurdle rate. In collections, timing and strategy-specific cost matter as much as headline recovery. See NPV in collections and Measuring effectiveness (NPV). |
| Gross recovery rate | Cash collected divided by refer balance (or your bank-defined numerator and denominator), often as a percentage. Compare like for like across internal, DCA1, and DCA2. |
| Net recovery (simple) | Cash collected minus cost to collect over the measurement window; a coarse economic proxy before full NPV modelling. |
| Cost per dollar recovered | Total cost to collect divided by total cash collected; lower is better when definitions match across strategies. |
| Recovery curve | Cumulative percentage of balance recovered over time (for example by month). Critical for NPV because earlier recovery usually increases present value. |
| Effectiveness (collections) | Outcome-focused performance: recovery, speed, cost, sustainability, and quality, not activity volume alone. See Measuring effectiveness (NPV). |