The people behind the recovery

INTERCOL was founded in late 1999 by a team of former international bankers from Diners Club International and Citibank UK. The founding principle was straightforward: commercial debt recovery across borders was broken, and the people best positioned to fix it were the ones who understood how international payments actually worked — not from a textbook, but from years of managing them.

The problem they saw was consistent across every market. A company in Germany ships goods to a buyer in Spain. The invoice goes unpaid. The German creditor contacts a local Spanish lawyer, who is excellent at Spanish law but has no context for the commercial relationship, no understanding of the creditor's urgency, and no network to escalate if the initial approach fails. The lawyer sends letters. The debtor ignores them. Six months pass. The creditor writes off the debt and resolves never to sell to Spain again. International trade loses another participant.

INTERCOL was built to prevent exactly this scenario. Instead of a single lawyer in a single jurisdiction, we assembled a network of recovery specialists across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond — each with deep local expertise, but all operating within a coordinated framework that ensures cases don't stall, debtors don't disappear into procedural complexity, and creditors don't wait months for updates that never arrive.

Twenty-five years later, the network spans 40+ jurisdictions with operational presence in every major commercial market. The founding team's banking background still shapes how we operate: structured, documented, compliant, and measured by results rather than activity. We don't send vague progress reports. We recover money.

The debt collection industry has a reputation problem — and not an entirely undeserved one. Too many agencies operate with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and the transparency of a brick wall. We take a different approach. Recovery should be professional, legally precise, and conducted with the kind of diplomatic persistence that preserves commercial relationships where possible and enforces legal obligations where necessary. Our clients are CFOs and finance directors at serious companies. They expect institutional-quality service. That's what we deliver.