Where the milliseconds actually go – telephony hop, transcription, model, synthesis – and the four decisions that took our end-to-end response time from conversational to natural.

Most recovery programmes are not lost at the negotiation. They are lost in the two weeks before it, in the queue of accounts nobody managed to reach. A collections floor of 200 agents places a fixed number of dials a day, and the pool of borrowers who answer an unknown number at 3pm on a Tuesday is smaller than any plan assumes.