Key Takeaways from TCN’s UK C3: The Art of the Possible
Key players in the UK credit and collections community gathered in Birmingham on July 9, 2026, for TCN’s first in-person UK C3 event, The Art of the Possible.
With nearly 400 years of collective industry experience in the room, the day was less about chasing tech-world hype and more about practical evolution, real-world testing and the undeniable power of human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaboration.
If you missed the sessions or just want a refresher while waiting to download the slide decks, watch the C3 recap video below and keep reading to review major themes and takeaways from the incredible day of insights.
The AI inflection: It’s an intelligence revolution, not a tech one
Opening the day, keynote speaker, TCN partner and Commercial Director at Arum Global, Stephen Wright, set a grounded tone for the AI conversation. While the pressure to deploy AI in collections and recoveries is intense, Stephen reminded attendees that “working with AI isn’t going to solve everything — using humans who can use AI will.”
AI is thriving in banking and collections via 24/7 self-serve income and expenditure, dynamic repayment plan generation and intelligent call routing. However, Stephen’s advice for cutting through the noise was simple: build clear requirements, get a live demo and deploy properly rather than instantly.
Building on this, Octavian Lovin, product engineering manager at TCN, reframed the paradigm. He stated that we aren’t living through a standard technological revolution; we are living through an intelligence revolution because AI capacity doubles every six months. Yet, Octavian cautioned that trust must be earned: “Sometimes AI tells you different stories confidently.”
Ultimately, UK C3 attendees learned that the most effective way to use AI starts with identifying your biggest operational bottleneck, testing it as you would a new employee and then scaling from there.
Navigating the post-Apple call screening era with SmartAMD
One of the most tactical sessions came from Dave Bethers, vice president of product at TCN, who addressed a massive shift hitting UK contact centres: the launch of Apple’s call screening feature. With up to 20% of consumers utilising these features, firms in the US and UK have seen diminishing returns and an inflation of answering machine detections.
TCN’s response is SmartAMD, a tool that utilises a large language model (LLM) trained on over 60,000 manual recordings to accurately categorise calls (human, iOS/Android call screen or standard voicemail). By slowing down dialler over-pacing and focusing on agent efficiency, Dave cited one TCN client who achieved 100% recognition accuracy and kept agent wait times between live conversations to just 20 seconds.
Shifting from supplier to partner
A major highlight was hearing from a real TCN user. Darren Rogers, strategic operations manager at Overdales Legal, shared their implementation journey. For a specialist litigation and debt recovery law firm, choosing TCN came down to operational reality: it’s cost-effective, features zero professional service fees and offers 24/7 global support.
Darren emphasised that TCN provides all the tools needed for compliance and operations, allowing for continuous improvement with zero coding required. More importantly, it isn’t a transactional client-supplier relationship; it’s a genuine business partnership.
Live tech in action: Flows, synapse and actionable BI
The afternoon then shifted into practical application. Spencer Taylor, TCN’s regional head of sales and operations UK & Éire, and Greg Brailsford, TCN product specialist, ran flawless live demos of TCN’s AI voice and chatbots, showcasing how automated conversations actually look in practice.
TCN Account Manager, Mario Anghel, then demonstrated Synapse, highlighting how user-configured stimulus triggers can automate complex workflows without human intervention. Examples included automatically dropping abandoned calls straight into a Short Message Service omnichannel campaign, or triggering post-call customer surveys that seamlessly feed back into the List Management Services data warehouse every 30 minutes to launch outbound campaigns.
Finally, Dave Bethers returned to demo TCN’s homegrown Business Intelligence (BI) platform. He highlighted how you don’t have to be a data analyst to use it; the platform lets you configure custom landing pages to expose productivity gaps.
Dave also shared a powerful case study of a client who recovered the equivalent of 12 Full-Time Employees (FTE) a day simply by identifying and closing agent productivity gaps using TCN’s data analytics.
Moving forward together
As TCN’s Executive Vice President for the UK and Europe, Kerry Sherman, noted in his closing comments, the core culture of TCN relies on establishing correct principles and letting talented people execute them. Good technology helps us build even better technology, but it’s the community and the conversations between colleagues and friends that drive the credit and collections industry forward.
Want to dive deeper into the strategies discussed? Reach out to the TCN team today to grab the session slides or to discover your own operational bottlenecks together.