Her Story
About Hannah
Hannah Abbey serves as General Manager of Recovery Operations at Bounce AI in Rochester, New York. She brings 14 years of experience in fintech and debt collection to her role, which she has held for six months after joining the company two and a half years ago. In this position, she oversees collections floors, agent performance, training and onboarding, debt settlement recovery, and legal collections channels. Prior to Bounce AI, Hannah spent 10 years at Coast Professional, beginning as a collection agent after earning her Bachelor's degree in Psychology from SUNY Geneseo. She advanced to Training Manager, where she developed training programs, then to Operations Manager on major contracts including the U.S. Department of Education, Fiscal Service and the IRS, and ultimately to Director of Collections, supervising over 100 employees across sites in New York, Louisiana, and California. She is ACA certified and attributes her success to a strong work ethic, self-sufficiency, and an insatiable drive for growth. Hannah values family as her top priority while striving for continuous personal and professional development.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Hannah
01What do you attribute your success to?
I was raised to be very self-sufficient. My family was not well-off growing up, and I quickly learned that if you want something, you have to work for it. So I don't ever expect anything to be handed to me. I attribute a lot of my success to that. I have very realistic expectations when it comes to future advancement opportunities. I come at them in a way of, “okay, if I want this, I'm going to have to put my head down, work hard, and earn it.”
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
It's such a niche thing to be a debt collector, because you have people coming from a customer service background who are taught the customer's always right approach, and then you have people who come from a traditional collections background that are like “I don't care what the consumer says, you owe a debt.” And so you have to find this delicate balance of: let's establish a rapport and establish trust with this consumer who owes this debt, and get them to trust you, and understand that you want to help them, but there is a debt that has to be repaid and it's our job to pull them out of it. So just finding that balance and taking like a human approach to it, I think, is the most difficult thing to teach.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
My family's always number one. I have two little ones at home and a husband, so they're always first in mind when I'm making decisions, both business and personal. And I think just making sure that I'm prioritizing what's best for me. I got comfortable earlier in my career and reached that place where I was thinking “this is probably as far as I'm gonna go, and as much as I'm gonna do” and I kind of had to yank myself out of that, and be like “no, you're capable of a lot more! Put value into yourself, and what you want to do, and not just what everybody else thinks that you're capable of!”
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