For collection agencies

By Kai Greenspan, Founding Editor

How your agency gets listed

We work through each covered state's public register, in order of public demand. In Texas that is the Secretary of State's surety bond record; every bonded third-party collector is on our worklist. There is no application form and no fee: if you hold the license, bond or registration your state requires, you are in the pipeline, and your profile appears once its facts have been verified by a person against the primary sources. If you believe your agency is bonded and we have not reached it yet, that is a matter of time, not eligibility.

How ranking works

Agencies are grouped into bands by verified continuous coverage on the state register, and listed alphabetically inside each band. No agency is ranked above another within its band, and the site asserts no ordinal position anywhere. The measure, its sources and every revision to it are public on the methodology page. Rankings cannot be bought, improved, or suppressed for payment, and no conversation with us changes where an agency sits; only the public record does.

Correcting your profile

Every fact on your profile links to where it comes from, with the date it was last checked where a check has run. If any of it is wrong, email corrections@debtcollectionindex.com with the page address and the evidence. A person reviews every challenge against the original source, corrections are made on the page itself, and agencies named on this site have a right of reply. The full process is in the corrections and right-of-reply policy.

Adding what the register cannot show

You cannot pay to be listed here and you cannot pay to rank, and neither of those will ever change. What the public record cannot show is how you actually work: which systems you integrate with, what you will and will not take, where your people are, or what languages they speak. You are the only source for that, and it is what a creditor filters on when they are ready to place accounts.

Claiming your page is how you add it. It changes nothing about the free half of your entry, which stays exactly as it is whether you claim it or not, and it cannot move you up: supplied facts are excluded from the ranking computation in code, not by policy. A claim has to be proven from the domain already on your profile.

Claim your page

Fixing something we got wrong is free, needs no claim and no account, and always will be. That is the Correcting your profile section above.

What we will never do

We do not sell placement in the rankings, remove verified public-record facts for payment, or accept payment to list or de-list any agency. If anyone offers to improve your position on this site in exchange for money, they are not us, and we would like to know about it.

Questions about the method belong on the methodology page; accountability for everything published sits with the named editor on the editorial standards page.