"If you don't start now, you'll be out of business in five years. The cost of running the old way is just too expensive"

A conversation with Ofer Alon, CEO of Quality Acceptance - on AI, collections, and the next five years

Ofer Alon has spent more than two decades in auto lending - long enough, by his own account, to have overseen close to $2 billion in collections. That's also long enough to remember when collections meant a large team, roughly 200,000 customers, and almost no way to know what any single collector was actually accomplishing. "It was a very primitive way," he says. When Quality Acceptance started working with Domu, the first thing that changed wasn't the calling. It was what he could finally see.

"The data opened my eyes. I realized how many people in my business were mainly doing nothing for hours a day and once you can see that, you can't unsee it."

What the data made visible

Domu's analytics showed Ofer something the old model never could: exactly when customers actually answer the phone, how many don't, and how much of the day was being spent calling into the void. With that visibility, the work rearranges itself, the system handles the routine, informative calls, and people are freed for the moments that need a human. For Ofer, the lesson wasn't really about software. It was about how the pieces fit together.

"Technology without people is like a sports car with no engine. You need all of it together - people, vision, technology, and data."

Where the risk really comes from

Ofer's strongest conviction is about compliance and it runs against the usual assumption that automation is the riskier path. In his experience, most trouble doesn't come from bad intent. It comes from humans being inconsistent in the moment.

"Most compliance problems come from human mistakes, the way people talk, the things they say. When you build the protocol into the system, you eliminate that noise."

A programmed agent, he points out, only ever delivers a message that's already been cleared against the rules; the FDCPA, the TCPA, and the rest. And because every call is recorded and analyzed, red-flag language gets caught automatically, turning what used to be a lawsuit months later into an alert you can resolve the same day. His estimate: virtual calling can remove at least half the problem.

"A virtual call should eliminate at least 50% of the risk."

Why customers open up to a machine

One of Ofer's most interesting observations is about the customer, not the technology. After years in lending, he's convinced that people in debt are often more honest with a machine than with a person.

"When people owe money, they feel uncomfortable talking about it with a person. A virtual agent gives them the confidence to talk, to complain and finally, someone listens."

He sees it as part of a larger shift already underway… the same one that made people comfortable asking a chatbot for advice and booking their whole lives from a phone. "In Japan," he notes, "the bellboy is already a robot. People thought it was crazy. It's not tomorrow, it's already here."

The next five years

Ofer's advice to other lenders is direct: start now, start small, and bring your people with you. Run a sample, then a bigger one, and upscale your team so they see the shift as their future rather than a threat. But he doesn't leave much room for sitting it out.

"If you don't start now, you'll be out of business in five years. The cost of running the old way is just too expensive."

And after nearly a year working together, he was clear about where he thinks it's heading.

"I believe Domu will be one of the biggest companies in the future."

About Quality Acceptance

Quality Acceptance, LLC is a privately held auto finance company founded in 1998 and headquartered in Los Angeles. It specializes in acquiring and servicing automobile installment contracts for customers with less-than-perfect credit, operating across California, Nevada, Texas, and Ohio.

About Domu

Domu is a voice AI platform built for regulated, high-volume interactions. Domu's agents handle servicing, collections, and customer communication autonomously inside client policy, with full traceability on every conversation, so financial institutions can scale AI without giving up compliance or control.