Interview: R. Fred Houston, CEO of Columbia Ultimate

Q. How did you get into the credit and collection industry?

A. I got involved in the collection industry in 1977 when I was managing collections for several retail stores. I joined Columbia Ultimate as a consultant in 1985 to help grow the company. That was when the collection industry started to embrace technology and great innovations were starting to take shape in the market.

Q. You had served as VP at Columbia Ultimate in the late 80′s and 90′s. What brought you back to Columbia Ultimate?

A. After my initial tenure at Columbia Ultimate, I left to start The Intelitech Group. The mission with The Intelitech Group was to continue fostering innovation with systems and technology to help clients increase efficiency in their collection efforts. But we realized that systems and technology alone were not going to make them more effective. Clients needed to know how to use the information in order to make their businesses more effective. The way to do that is through analytics. At that time, there were no other firms in the market focused on helping businesses mine the data and use information to make better decisions. We saw a great niche in the marketplace.

Larry Bair approached me with an opportunity to return to Columbia Ultimate to serve as president. Because of the strong synergy between The Intelitech Group and Columbia Ultimate, it came as a natural next step in my career to return to Columbia Ultimate and help lead the company into the next stage of growth. I was also very eager to return to work with the people and clients that made such a positive impact during my initial years at the company.

Q. What experiences did you have at The Intelitech Group that might have changed your outlook on collection software?

A. Understanding the importance of having software support the objectives of management at collection agencies. The value-adds are the strategies and the leadership of the business. Columbia Ultimate software has the functionality for management to define the business logic vs. being driven by the software.