The Hyde Group was Highly Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025. Ladi Joseph, head of income at The Hyde Group, explains how the housing provider has moved from lists and spreadsheets to a new way of managing income collection.
One of The Hyde Group’s core missions is ‘maintaining a sharp focus on operating efficiencies with prudent investment’. It was this mantra that influenced our digital transformation journey and our decision to embrace artificial intelligence (AI).
Before the pandemic, our income officers struggled to get through their weekly caseloads using a legacy income-analytics product. The pandemic presented further challenges by limiting the actions they could take against rising caseloads.
A new approach to income management
With a growing backlog and an urgent need to get our income team back on track, we began the process of addressing our approach to income management, how we dealt with arrears caseloads and, like many housing providers, getting ahead of the socio-economic challenges facing the sector.
In 2021, we formed a partnership with Voicescape, implementing its Collections solution to enhance our income process through automated outbound phone messages and SMS texting. Then in 2022, after the success of this streamlined method of engagement, we looked into the potential of also integrating Voicescape’s Caseload Manager software which uses AI, machine learning, data science and behavioural insights to actively manage arrears and address the universal income challenges experienced across our sector.
The adoption of Caseload Manager has helped us to prioritise our arrears cases, free up staff resources and better serve our customers, while supporting the collection of rents of £268m, up by £24m compared with 2022/23.
Making the case for Caseload Manager
Caseload Manager reviews individual tenancies every day, responding in near real-time to any changes in circumstances. It then processes automated interventions. By minimising the generation of new caseloads and automating interventions where possible, Caseload Manager vastly reduces the number of manual tasks our income officers need to do, enabling us to deliver optimum outcomes for both us and our tenants.
Voicescape worked closely with our team to analyse and test our arrears caseload, determine RoI targets and tailor the implementation of Caseload Manager. We launched to our ‘general needs’ tenure first, followed by our ‘homeowner’ tenure a few months later.
Voicescape’s automation was the first big success for us. We had played around with our previous system to try and reduce our workload and get through our caseload each week but we just couldn’t do it. Automation was therefore the first big trigger that really helped us reduce our caseloads to a workable level.
Benefits of AI
Our income officers had to develop confidence in Caseload Manager’s data and trust the AI recommendations over their own manual findings.
That trust grew over time. The more faith our income officers placed in the solution, the better results they saw, and the more Caseload Manager’s machine-learning capabilities learned about the nuances and finer details of our customers’ behaviours and the actions needed for future decisions.
The results
Since going live with Caseload Manager, our income officers are now presented with around 140 cases per week, compared with over 400 before. However, the technology is only part of our success story; our ongoing collaboration with Voicescape has allowed the system to be further developed to accelerate our processes even further.
This has enabled us to hit our lowest arrears percentage in four years, achieving 4.8 per cent in 2023/24, well ahead of our target of 5.3 per cent, with arrears reduced to below our £13m goal. In 2024/25, the number of accounts in arrears has fallen by 500 and arrears are down to £12.7m.
Our income team was used to just working through lists and spreadsheets so using Caseload Manager has been a very new way of working for them, but we’ve seen great results for the last financial year and we’re now already on track to have an even better year.
Ladi Joseph is the head of income at The Hyde Group. The housing provider was Highly Commended in the Artificial Intelligence category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025.
