Selling debt: cash program for utilities.

Debt collection brings visions of unsavory telephone tactics and verbal brass knuckles. But it has always had a place in business, and is especially meaningful to companies with huge ranks of individual consumers, not all of whom pay on time--if at all.

In recent years, companies have been formed to help corporations get something for uncollected debt--essentially by buying that debt (often amassed on credit cards) for a fraction of its face value and assuming responsibility for the collections. One firm that specializes in doing that for the utility industry is InoVision of Richmond, Va.

The $10.5 million (2002 revenue) InoVison, a unit of the Marlin Co., has been buying utilities' consumer debt, often for pennies on the dollar, in one-time, non-recourse deals. InoVision, which recently announced that it has bought $1 billion in such debt over the past six years, says the utilities get cash and the time value of the money, and reduce their administrative costs. The firm is working with a host of high-profile utilities, including Duke Power, Consolidated Edison in New York, Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, Dominion Power in Virginia, First Energy in the Northeast, and national phone companies like Verizon Communications, Sprint and Cingular Wireless.

InoVision President Joel Lewis, a former credit manager with Dominion Power, says that most of the individual utility debt balances are small--averaging about $300--and involve customers who have left the area, The debts it buys have already gone through an external collection agency and have been "warehoused" and written off.

Lewis says he doesn't refuse even the most unpromising files, but pays less for them based on due diligence that includes the use of analytic software. InoVision itself is profitable, he says, largely because it "can afford to put more effort into finding people" than the utilities can, including the use of electronic skip-tracing firms. And he insists that the benefit to the utility can be practically immediate: once a debt file is accepted, InoVision will often wire the cash the same day.