Case Study – Overseas Collection
in South Korea
Client: Canadian Export Insurance
Customer: Commercial entity based in South Korea
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Country: South Korea
Debt amount: $67,629.03
Invoice Due date: Sep 2020
Case handled first by our in-house team. Initially, the customer made numerous promises to settle the debt but to no avail. Our approach is always to balance our collection efforts, with the intention of preserving the trading relationship. However, our client swiftly informed us that the relationship had broken down, and they had no intention of trading with them again.
The challenges were two-fold, firstly the geographic location, and secondly, the fact that the customer began making complaints about the quality of the products they received and used this as a stalling tactic. We advised our client to allow us to add interest and collection charges, this can be used as a negotiating tactic and seeks to mitigate our client’s costs.
The case was passed to our partner in South Korea (Law firm) who established contact with the customer and after numerous negotiations, including additional customer complaints about quality of products received, the customer made a settlement offer to the client. Our client refused to accept this offer and made counteroffer which customer also declined. Our client requested costs to pursue legal action, and an outline of how the process worked.
This succeeded in the customer making an improved final offer of 50% of the principal balance in 6 instalments.
Our client decided to accept the customer’s counteroffer. Our partner in South Korea prepared the settlement agreement, (which will help in the future in case client decided to take legal action if any of the instalments were missed ) Our partner then visited the customers address to make sure that the settlement agreement was signed and stamped in timely manner.
The customer has already made their first payment in line with the settlement agreement.
Key to this successful collection was having a local partner who could negotiate a settlement agreement while understanding the language, the countries’ legal system and the local culture of doing business.