Columbia Ultimate 2013 Year in Review

Columbia Ultimate, industry leaders in providing clients with revenue maximization solutions for more than 30 years, ended 2013 with partnerships and new compliance solutions designed to benefit the whole ARM industry.

“It was a remarkable year for us,” said Columbia Ultimate President and CEO R. Fred Houston. “We realized that ongoing challenges like maintaining compliance are industry-wide problems, and not simply about one agency that might be having trouble.”

Columbia Ultimate also introduced UltimateCompliance, the hosted Compliance Management System (CMS), which provides single point of global control for compliance managers, clients and regulators to use when they’re auditing and reviewing an agency’s regulatory compliance controls.

“It was important to us that UltimateCompliance was made available to all collections industry professionals, including non-Columbia Ultimate users. We already have more than ten users and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” said Houston.

Product updates and innovations remained top priorities throughout the year with the introduction of Ajility 3.0, the latest update to its newest ARM software solution. Ajility 3.0’s latest upgrades include built-in UltimateAnalytics, UltimatePayments, UltimateAccess, a hosted model (SaaS) and UltimateCompliance.

“These latest updates proved to be our most popular to date and in 2013 we added 19 new Ajility clients,” said Houston.

Columbia Ultimate also introduced a new corporate structure with the development of designated strategic entrepreneurial units (SEU). “The creation of the SEUs afforded us a stronger platform to be more efficient and effective in serving our clients,” said Houston.

Client care and education took precedence in 2013 at Columbia Ultimate’s annual Art of Success Conference. The conference, held in Portland, Oregon, brought together collection agency managers, healthcare professionals, government collection experts, and IT specialists from across the U.S. to network and share collection industry best practices. 2014’s Art of Success Conference will again be held Portland in September 2014.

Established in 1979 and headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., Columbia Ultimate is a privately held corporation servicing healthcare, collections agencies, debt buyers, banking and finance, retail and government sectors. Columbia Ultimate’s family of companies includes Columbia Ultimate, RevQ, HealthWare and The Intelitech Group. RevQ provides industry leading software solutions and consulting services to improve collections in the government sector. The Intelitech Group is a business management and debt recovery consulting company that provides technology solutions designed to enhance profitability. HealthWare provides revenue cycle management solutions to the healthcare industry. More information is available at www.columbiaultimate.com