About

The ledger should know the rules.

Otto is a single operating system for collections law firms — one live record of every account, with the rules that govern it running before each step, not audited after.

Consumer credit is part of how American households absorb shocks. A transmission fails, a hospital bills more than anyone expected, hours get cut for a quarter. Credit takes the hit, and some of it goes unpaid. That has been true for as long as there has been consumer credit, and it will be true for as long as there is. The question was never whether the work would exist. The question is whether it is done carefully.

For most of the last thirty years it has been done on software built for a different era. Balances live on a server in a closet. Placement files arrive as spreadsheets and leave as spreadsheets. Scrubs get run by hand against a list somebody exported on Tuesday. Code tables are maintained by whoever has been there longest, and the institutional memory of the firm walks out the door when that person retires. None of this is anyone's fault — these systems were remarkable when they shipped, and firms built real businesses on them. But they were designed when a case file was a folder, and they still behave that way.

The cost of that is not mainly inefficiency. It is that the record and the rules live in different places. A firm can know a consumer disputed a debt and still have a letter go out, because the halt lived in someone's notes and the mail queue never heard about it. A firm can be entirely well-intentioned and still be unable to prove, eighteen months later, what it knew on a Tuesday in March. Everyone in this industry has felt the particular dread of a client audit that starts with three days of assembling evidence that should already have existed.

We think that is a systems problem, and systems problems are solvable.

Otto puts the whole firm on one live ledger — placements, documents, calls, letters, payments, filings — and puts the rules inside it. Consent, contact windows, validation timing, attorney representation, hardship holds, client-specific instructions: these are not a compliance report you generate at month end. They are conditions evaluated before an action happens, in the moment the action is attempted. When the answer is no, the action does not occur, and the reason is written down with a citation. That record is the same record the firm's clients see.

The second thing that follows from one ledger is that a firm can finally see itself. Which portfolios actually liquidate. Which arrangements hold and which quietly break in month three. Where the work is piling up and who is carrying it. Firms have been sitting on this data the whole time — it was simply spread across a case system, a dialer, a payment processor, and a spreadsheet, in formats that never reconciled. Bringing it together is not a dashboard exercise. It changes which decisions a managing partner can make on a Monday morning.

The third thing is the consumer's experience, which we do not think is separate from the firm's. Most people on the other end of these accounts are not evading anything. They are behind, they are embarrassed, and the systems they encounter make an already bad week worse — hold music, a number that goes nowhere, a letter that arrives after the thing it is warning about. A consumer who can see what is owed, understand their options, and set up a payment at eleven at night without speaking to anyone resolves more accounts than one who cannot. Treating people decently and running a healthy firm point in the same direction more often than this industry assumes.

This is also, plainly, the moment. Language models are good enough to read a two-hundred-page account history, draft the response, and cite where every fact came from. That capability is arriving in this industry whether or not anyone is thoughtful about it — and the difference between it being an asset and a liability is entirely whether the rules are wired in underneath. An AI that can act on an account is only safe if something above it knows what it is not allowed to do. We would rather build that layer than watch it get skipped.

We are early, and we would rather say so than oversell it. Otto is being built with firms rather than at them, which means the roadmap below is shaped by people who do this work every day and have been generous with their time. This page is where we will show what changes, honestly, as it ships.

One record: Placement to judgment on a single live ledger — no nightly batch, no reconciling a dialer report against a case file on Monday.
Rules that run first: Consent, contact windows, validation timing, holds and client instructions evaluated before an action, with the reason recorded either way.
Evidence as a by-product: The audit package is assembled continuously, because it is the same record the work runs on.
Built with practitioners: Designed alongside collections attorneys, paralegals, collectors and compliance staff, not inferred from a category report.

We did the homework first.

Months inside creditor-side firms — collectors, paralegals, attorneys, compliance officers, and the operations managers who actually run the placement flow.
The incumbents, studied line by line: CollectMax, Q-LawE, Collection-Master — their conference decks, their user forums, their release notes.
The regulators, read at the source: Reg F, the FDCPA, the SCRA, and the state overlays for each jurisdiction we configure, versioned into the engine like code.
The banks' vendor-oversight playbooks — because your client's audit checklist is our product spec.

Compliance is the product: Not a checkbox, not a module. Every feature starts from the rule that governs it — because in this practice, speed without proof is just liability.
The work deserves respect: Collections done carefully is legitimate, regulated, necessary work. We build for the firms doing it carefully — and give them the receipts to prove it.
No black boxes: Every answer cites its source. Every block names its rule. Every AI call is logged with what it saw and what it hid. If we can't show our work, we don't ship it.

We’re hiring the first five people.

Founding product engineering, forward-deployed engineering, founding sales, compliance as code, and a general counsel who treats the regulation as product surface. San Francisco, in the room, on a published band. See the roles.

This page describes Otto, not the law, and is not legal advice. Otto applies rules that have been written down correctly; it does not warrant that using it results in compliance with any statute, regulation or contract. Where a rule is named here, confirm it against the primary source and your own counsel before relying on it.