What AI Calling Costs a Lender When You Only Pay for Results

Here's the straight answer. With PTS AI, AI calling costs a lender nothing up front. There's no install fee.

You pay only for results: a booked meeting or a reactivated customer.

Nothing else is billed. Not calls. Not minutes. Not seats. Not months.

If there are no results, there's nothing to pay.

The amount per result isn't published. It's quoted on the call.

The rest of this article covers why we price it this way, what a COO should poke at before saying yes, and how to check the math with your numbers instead of ours.

How most AI calling is sold, and who carries the risk

You've probably sat through a few of these pitches already.

Most AI calling is sold by the seat, by the minute or by the month. The vendor gets paid for the voice making calls. Whether those calls turn into anything is your problem.

That's not a scam. It's just how software usually gets sold. But look at who holds the risk.

If the list is dirty, you pay for minutes spent dialing dead numbers. If calls go out after the branch closes, you pay for transfers that ring into an empty office. If nobody at the branch picks up, you still pay. The vendor has been paid either way.

So the vendor has every reason to make calls. It has much less reason to care what happens after them.

And after the call is where the money is. Picture a Tuesday at 11 a.m. at a branch in a small Georgia town. The AI reaches a borrower who paid off last spring. She's interested. If the transfer goes to a shared line three counties away, she hangs up. If nobody logs it, her branch manager never knows she was on the phone. A per-minute vendor got paid for that call. You got nothing.

What paying only for results changes

Paying only for booked meetings and reactivated customers flips that.

We only earn when you get a result. A call doesn't pay us. A minute doesn't pay us. A month on the calendar doesn't pay us.

That changes what we have to care about.

We can't get paid for dialing dead numbers, so the list has to be cleaned and the phones verified first. We can't get paid for a transfer into an empty branch, so calls go out only during branch hours. We can't get paid if the borrower lands on the wrong line, so each interested borrower goes live to their own local branch, from a local number with that branch's caller ID.

It also means the unglamorous parts get done. Calling no-answers again. Writing every outcome into the CRM you already run, the same day. A board by branch, so you can see called, reached and transferred for each location.

Nobody enjoys owning those jobs. Under this model, they're how we get paid, so we own them.

For the longer case for this model, and how it compares with the usual ways calling is priced, read paying only for results.

What a COO will still want to check

You're probably already looking for the catch. Fair. Here are the honest ones.

1. You need to see which call produced which result. This is the big one. A meeting on the branch calendar doesn't tell you where it came from. The fix is one ID that follows the customer from the first call, into the CRM record, onto the transfer, and through what happens at the branch. We walk through how that works in what happens after the AI call, and what the weekly view looks like in branch-level reporting for lenders. If your CRM can't carry that ID today, that's the first thing to talk about.

2. A booked meeting still has to be worked by the branch. We get the borrower to your branch, live, while it's open. What happens next is your team's job. If the meeting isn't followed up, or the borrower waits twenty minutes at the counter, the result is on the calendar but the loan isn't. That's why we care about the handoff as much as you do.

3. The lending decision stays yours. We don't underwrite. Your branch decides who gets a loan, the same as with any walk-in. That's how it should be.

4. Compliance is still yours to check. The pricing model doesn't change the calling rules. In February 2024 the FCC announced a ruling that calls made with AI-generated voices count as "artificial" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the main law the FCC uses to limit junk calls. Your compliance team should review the list, the consent and the script before anyone dials. That's educational context, not legal advice.

Do the math with your own numbers

We can't tell you what this is worth to your network. We don't know your show-up rate, your funding rate or your margin. You do.

So here's a worksheet. Every cell marked "your number" is yours to fill in. The one Sunset figure is there only to show how the chain works.

Here's what's different from a per-seat or per-minute deal. The bill only touches the bold row in the middle. If that row is zero, so is the bill.

So the question isn't "will this pay for itself?" It's "is the amount quoted per result fair against what those results are worth to me?"

If you don't know how big the list is yet, start with how to size the customer list you're not calling. If you'd rather have the arithmetic done for you, the free past customer calculator runs the same chain.

A few notes to keep yourself honest:

• Use the list you'd really call, not your whole database. Some of those customers you'd never lend to again.
• Use your real show-up and funding rates from walk-ins or renewals, not a hopeful guess.
• The Sunset number comes from one lender, one list and one offer: past customers and a pre-approved loan of up to $1,000. It's an illustration, not a forecast for your branches.

How the first 14 days work

You start with one branch.

First, the list for that branch is cleaned and the phones are verified. Then the local number, caller ID and voice agent are set up. Finally, the branch starts receiving calls. In 14 days every reachable customer on that list is called, and interested borrowers are transferred live to that branch while it's open.

At day 14 you have the numbers by branch: called, reached, transferred.

We walk through every step in what week one looks like.

Nothing is paid up front for any of that. You pay only when it produces a booked meeting or a reactivated customer.

For a sense of scale, look at Sunset Finance, a network of consumer lending branches in Georgia. They had 43,000 past customers sitting unused. In the first 14 days of the pilot, Tommy, their voice agent, placed 13,159 calls and produced about 100 live transfers across 10 branches. They've gone from 10 branches to 28, with 224 live transfers and counting.

Waiting doesn't save you a fee

Under this model, waiting doesn't save you money. There's no fee to put off.

What waiting does is let the list get older. Every month it sits, the borrower who paid off last spring gets a little further from remembering you.

And you're not the only one who wants her. The FTC explains that a lender can set its own requirements and ask a credit bureau, such as Equifax, Experian, TransUnion or Innovis, for a list of people whose credit reports meet them. Your past customers can be on those lists.

If you want to hear the amount per result for your network, leave your number on the consumer finance page. Our AI calls you within minutes and books time with our team.