Shield Mercantile Pty Ltd was established in 1988. The company now has offices in five mainland cities in Australia and employs over 60 people.

Contrary to recent trends towards centralisation, the Managing Director has maintained separate state-based offices in the knowledge that this structure provides better customer service. The local knowledge of our state based collectors generates better results for our customers.

The company has developed unique skills in the Debt Collection Industry. We have a thoroughly documented quality process that is accredited under AS/NZS ISO 9001:2008.

Our clients are predominately Financial Institutions, hence our specialisation in Debt Collection. The service we offer to Clients is in the primary, secondary, tertiary, legal and debt reserve recovery programs. As a result we occupy a niche that no other agency specialises in.

We include the following service level guarantees and we undertake to enlarge on these guarantees subject to the client’s requirements.

Debtor Management Procedures

Compliance with all relevant state and Federal Acts; eg Privacy Act, Trade Practices Act and UCCC.

Complaints will not exceed 0.001% of all accounts downloaded.

Gross Recovery Rate

Based on preliminary discussions and assuming that the primary debt collection function has been performed effectively, we expect to recover in excess of 8% annually, but 12% is not unrealistic.

Reporting Time Lines

We undertake to provide electronic reconciliations within 3 working days of close off dates (i.e. end of month reporting period).

One-off requests for reports and other information will be addressed immediately and response times will be within 48 hours of the request in the majority of cases.

Collection Procedures

Shield Mercantile applies a structured manual process documents in our Quality System. (A copy of this process is available on request).

Shield Mercantile is equipped with the latest version of the Collect! Credit and Collection system supplied by Comtech Systems Inc.

Collect! automates and streamlines collection, administration, reporting, letter writing and accounting functions. Collect! can develop and adapt as our business needs change. We can define your own business rules and automate our operation to maximize profit and work flow with Collect!. Over 1200 companies in 35 countries manage billions of dollars in receivables daily using Collect!.

The system operates on RDM® Server 8.0 by Raima. RDM® Server is a powerful, cross-platform, small footprint database designed for server applications with demanding performance requirements. RDM® Server meets the needs of competitive businesses and embedded applications by offering a feature rich and scalable data management solution.

With its highly flexible plug in model combined with features like data replication, in-memory support, and data encryption, RDM® Server has become the number one choice in many carrier grade applications needing a high degree of fault tolerance and reliability. Designed not only for fault-tolerance, but also for real-time processing RDM® Server has unique features to ensure fast real-time transaction processing.

This computer system is supported by an on-site server providing hot-online backup, a daily tape-backup and an off-site server (data risk) that backs up data each evening.

Inter-company communication is supported by a local area network hosted by Telstra. This facility is state-of-the-art in terms of IT functions and allows maximum flexibility with minimum risk in terms of natural disasters and security.