At Firmhouse, we help companies enter the field of online rentals and lease. It promotes temporary use of products, results in less product ownership, and maximizes the return of investment companies can make on products.
Starting with rentals, especially when sold solely online, comes with business risks. Without real-world interactions between you and your customers, it's not as easy to check for identification and apply other ways of detecting malicious customers before you rent out your product.
Preventing and mitigating fraud is an operational challenge, and usually not what you want to spend your time on starting something new. A lot of solutions already exist, but all are part of the puzzle in risk management. Therefore we started developing Firmhouse Protect, which aims to make pre-credit management and debt collection easy for e-commerce businesses, across Europe.
Most rental businesses use a form of Customer Acceptance checks. During or after sign-up, a risk score for a customer is requested through third-party data providers. The Firmhouse platform currently offers automated acceptance checks, and when we don't support a preferred method just yet, a manual acceptance strategy can be adapted.
Checking multiple Customer Acceptance sources is highly recommended, especially when you rent out valuable assets. Pairing acceptance checks with address validation, bank account, and identity verification lay the foundation for the ability for pre-credit management and escalate the serious cases.
The most important and time-consuming of debt collection is correctly building your cases. Successful debt collection depends on the quality of information, paper trails of the dunning process, and the amount of work the debt collection agency still has to perform. When you have many gaps, the case or debt has to be big to actually check-out.
Firmhouse Protect provides an end-to-end solution to organize what happens before collection:
We are partnering with Intrum to develop a deep integration for case escalation. With one-click, a full fraud case can be handed over to Intrum for debt collection or return of the product. We have some exciting news for this partnership coming soon.
Join the beta program
Our research showed that fraud cases and customer defaults take up a big portion of online rental businesses' revenue. We are looking to collaborate with online rental businesses during our development of this stand-alone product, accepting rentals via their online channels and physical touch points. As part of our beta, we'll be able to shape the product to your needs!
Just reach out to the team, and we'll get back to you.
