We're Hiring: Senior Collections Specialist
Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Experience Level: Senior
Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About UsWe are a globally focused organization committed to maintaining disciplined, efficient, and customer-focused financial operations across diverse markets. Our teams collaborate across Finance, Accounts Receivable, Billing, Credit, Sales, Commercial, Legal, Customer Service, Risk, and Operations to support healthy cash flow and sustainable customer relationships.
Our collections function combines receivables management, customer communication, credit-risk monitoring, dispute resolution, payment negotiation, reconciliation, and financial reporting to ensure outstanding balances are managed professionally and effectively.
The RoleWe are seeking an experienced Senior Collections Specialist to manage complex customer accounts, lead collection activities, resolve payment disputes, negotiate payment arrangements, monitor credit exposure, and support improvements across the order-to-cash cycle.
The ideal candidate will combine strong accounts-receivable and collections expertise with excellent negotiation, analytical, communication, and problem-solving capabilities. The role will manage overdue portfolios, engage customers and internal stakeholders, identify collection risks, coordinate escalations, and support timely and accurate cash recovery while maintaining professional customer relationships.
Key Responsibilities
- * Manage end-to-end collections activities across assigned customer portfolios and business units.
- Review customer accounts, outstanding invoices, payment history, credit limits, disputes, and aging balances.
- Prioritize collection activities based on overdue amounts, customer risk, aging, materiality, and payment behavior.
- Monitor accounts receivable aging and identify overdue, high-risk, disputed, or potentially uncollectible balances.
- Contact customers through appropriate communication channels to follow up on outstanding invoices and payment commitments.
- Maintain professional and constructive relationships with customers throughout the collection process.
- Communicate clearly with customers regarding outstanding balances, invoice details, payment terms, due dates, and required actions.
- Conduct structured collection calls, emails, account reviews, and payment follow-ups.
- Negotiate payment plans, settlement arrangements, and structured repayment solutions within approved authority.
- Monitor customer commitments and follow up on agreed payment dates.
- Escalate broken payment promises, persistent delinquency, and material credit-risk concerns.
- Coordinate with Billing teams to resolve invoice errors, missing documentation, incorrect charges, and billing discrepancies.
- Work with Sales and Commercial teams to resolve customer disputes and account issues affecting payment.
- Coordinate with Customer Service and Operations teams to resolve service-related issues contributing to overdue balances.
- Work with Credit teams to review customer credit limits, payment terms, exposure, and risk status.
- Support credit-limit reviews based on payment behavior and outstanding exposure.
- Identify customers showing signs of financial stress or deteriorating payment performance.
- Conduct account-level risk assessments using payment history, aging, exposure, disputes, and other relevant indicators.
- Recommend appropriate escalation or collection strategies for high-risk accounts.
- Maintain detailed records of collection activities, customer communications, payment promises, disputes, escalations, and outcomes.
- Ensure collection notes and customer-account information are accurately recorded in ERP, CRM, and collections systems.
- Reconcile customer accounts and investigate outstanding balance discrepancies.
- Identify unapplied cash, short payments, overpayments, duplicate payments, credit balances, and other reconciliation issues.
- Coordinate with Cash Application and Accounts Receivable teams to resolve payment-allocation issues.
- Review customer statements and account reconciliations before initiating complex collection actions.
- Support resolution of disputed invoices and track disputes through to closure.
- Maintain an accurate dispute register and monitor dispute aging.
- Identify root causes of recurring disputes and recommend corrective actions.
- Monitor overdue balances by customer, business unit, region, product, contract, or other relevant categories.
- Prepare and maintain collection action plans for significant or high-risk accounts.
- Coordinate escalations for material overdue balances in accordance with internal credit and collections procedures.
- Work with Legal teams on accounts requiring formal demand letters, legal review, litigation, or other recovery actions.
- Support external collection agencies, legal representatives, and recovery specialists where applicable.
- Monitor third-party collection performance and ensure cases are appropriately documented and followed up.
- Support bad-debt assessment, provisioning, write-off recommendations, and recovery processes.
- Provide collection information to Finance teams for expected-credit-loss and bad-debt analysis.
- Monitor customer payment behavior and identify trends that may affect cash-flow forecasts.
- Support cash-flow forecasting by providing expected collection dates and recovery estimates.
- Prepare daily, weekly, and monthly collections reports covering aging, overdue balances, cash collections, promises to pay, disputes, and recovery performance.
- Develop dashboards and management information covering collection effectiveness and portfolio risk.
- Monitor collection performance against assigned targets, service-level requirements, and approved credit policies.
- Track collection productivity, contact effectiveness, recovery rates, and overdue-balance movements.
- Conduct root-cause analysis of persistent overdue balances and recommend process improvements.
- Identify opportunities to improve collection workflows, customer communications, automation, and account prioritization.
- Support automated collections, customer portals, payment reminders, workflow tools, and digital payment initiatives.
- Evaluate collection technologies and data analytics that can improve recovery performance and customer experience.
- Establish appropriate controls to ensure collections activities are accurate, consistent, documented, and compliant.
- Ensure collection activities comply with applicable financial, privacy, consumer-protection, contractual, and regulatory requirements.
- Maintain confidentiality when handling customer financial, commercial, personal, and payment information.
- Support internal and external audits relating to accounts receivable, collections, credit control, and customer balances.
- Track audit findings and implement corrective actions within required timelines.
- Develop and maintain collections procedures, escalation guidelines, call standards, templates, and process documentation.
- Provide guidance and mentoring to junior collections specialists and accounts-receivable staff.
- Review complex collection cases handled by junior team members and provide practical guidance.
- Support training on collections techniques, negotiation, customer communication, systems, controls, and compliance.
- Provide management with regular updates on overdue accounts, significant exposures, recovery risks, disputes, escalations, and improvement opportunities.
Key Performance Indicators
- * Total collections achieved
- Cash collection rate
- Collection effectiveness index
- Days sales outstanding
- Accounts-receivable aging
- Overdue balance reduction
- Current-to-overdue migration rate
- Past-due collection rate
- Promise-to-pay fulfillment rate
- Payment commitment accuracy
- Collection contact effectiveness
- Customer response rate
- Collection turnaround time
- Recovery rate
- High-risk account recovery
- Bad-debt recovery
- Write-off rate
- Bad-debt ratio
- Expected-credit-loss accuracy
- Dispute resolution time
- Dispute closure rate
- Disputed balance reduction
- Invoice dispute escalation rate
- Customer account reconciliation accuracy
- Unapplied cash resolution
- Short-payment resolution
- Overpayment resolution
- Credit-limit compliance
- Customer exposure monitoring
- Credit-risk escalation timeliness
- Collection action-plan completion
- Legal escalation timeliness
- Third-party agency performance
- Customer satisfaction
- Complaint resolution effectiveness
- Collections service-level compliance
- Collections productivity
- Portfolio coverage
- Collection forecast accuracy
- Cash-flow forecast contribution
- Collections reporting accuracy
- Collections reporting timeliness
- Process improvement completion
- Automation adoption
- Internal-control compliance
- Audit finding resolution
- Data and system accuracy
- Junior-team development
Ideal CandidateThe successful candidate should have strong experience in collections, accounts receivable, credit control, order-to-cash, finance operations, or commercial credit management, preferably within a large organization, shared-services environment, financial institution, professional-services business, technology company, or high-volume commercial operation.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Proven experience managing complex customer collections and overdue receivables.
- Strong understanding of accounts-receivable and end-to-end order-to-cash processes.
- Extensive experience managing aging balances, overdue accounts, and customer payment commitments.
- Strong knowledge of collection strategies, escalation procedures, and payment negotiations.
- Excellent negotiation and customer-communication skills.
- Experience resolving billing disputes and coordinating cross-functional issue resolution.
- Strong understanding of credit-risk indicators, customer exposure, and payment behavior.
- Experience reviewing customer accounts, credit limits, payment history, and outstanding exposure.
