The Future’s Not Waiting: Lessons from CRS 2025

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Collection and Recovery Solutions 2025 in Las Vegas. I’ve been attending this conference for 12 years, and it’s still one of the most insightful events in the industry. As Head of Product at MBSi, I always look forward to stepping out of the day-to-day and into environments where ideas, challenges, and opportunities are flying around like confetti. This year didn’t disappoint.

From the moment I checked into the hotel, I could feel the buzz and was greeted with many familiar faces. It wasn’t just the caffeine or the sophistication of the Four Seasons—it was a genuine sense that our industry is at an inflection point. Whether you’re on the lending or service side, it’s clear we’re all being called to think bigger and act faster.

But here’s the thing: inspiration is great, but real progress starts with a clear understanding of the problems lenders, forwarders and agencies are facing. Throughout the sessions, roundtables, and hallway conversations, three big industry challenges kept rising to the surface. I’ll dive into them in more detail below—but first, a little about what made this conference so insightful.

Making Time for Big Picture Thinking

One of my favorite parts of the conference was stepping away from screens and Slack threads and spending time in person with customers and industry thinkers. There’s something uniquely valuable about the spontaneous chats that happen in line for coffee or the honest takeaways you get from a session debrief with peers.

We spend so much time solving problems at the micro level—bugs, sprints, roadmap prioritization—that it’s easy to lose sight of macro trends shaping the future. Events like this are a chance to lift our heads, compare notes, and ask: are we building for what’s next, or just keeping up with what’s now?

A Pulse on the Market

I was invited by a client to help lead the automotive repossession roundtable and a few recurring themes stood out during the hour and a half:

• Cost per repossession is on the rise
• Increasing number of impounds in the market
• Post recovery fragmentation is causing headaches

Each lender at the roundtable had a different angle as they came from a variety of different lending institutions and backgrounds, but the message was clear: the ground is shifting, and we need to move with it.

Of course, challenges aren’t necessarily bad news. They’re signals—telling us where we need to focus, where new opportunities lie, and where we may need to rethink how we work.

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Bringing It Back to the Team

Conferences are only as valuable as what we do after them, and I’m excited to share some of these learnings with our team at MBSi. Some will influence our near-term roadmap decisions. Others might spark internal experiments or customer conversations. And some are simply questions I want us to sit with as we think about the next 6–12 months: Are we solving the right problems? Are we aligned on what success looks like for our customers? Are we moving at the right pace?

Looking Ahead

If there’s one thing I took away from CRS, it’s this: the pace of change isn’t slowing down, and the companies that thrive will be the ones who can stay clear-headed amid the noise, focused on what really matters, and willing to adapt when needed.

I'm grateful to the Naimans for hosting a great conference that facilitates connection with others who are navigating the same waters, and I’m even more energized to get back to work—hopefully a bit wiser, a bit more curious, and a lot more aligned on what’s coming next. What challenges are you seeing in your corner of the industry? I’d love to hear your take.

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