Nathan McDonald

Nathan McDonald founded Collect Compare after years spent inside the UK debt recovery industry. What struck him hardest there was the size of the gap between a good agency and a bad one, and how little a creditor has to go on when choosing between them beyond which firm markets hardest.

Before that came roughly fifteen years in financial services and other regulated consumer markets: eight of them at Gladstone Brookes, one of the UK’s largest PPI claims companies, and the rest across pensions, energy and telecoms. Those industries have more in common than the labels suggest. All are regulated, sales-led and fought over on price, and all of them turn on the distance between what a firm promises while it is winning you and what it does once it has you. Spotting that distance early is most of what vetting an agency actually is.

He has been on the other side of an unpaid invoice, too. Working for himself meant sending the invoice, watching the date go past and making the awkward phone call, which teaches you something the industry side never quite does. He wrote about that in one of the guides below.

Collect Compare came out of all of it. Agencies are compared blind, with names hidden until a creditor picks one, so none can win the work on brand recognition or by paying for position. The guides follow the same rule: people decide better when the options are laid out plainly, including the ones that make nobody any money.