Across retail banks, financial services, utilities, telco, and government, large-scale change programmes are embracing the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver faster, smarter outcomes. Collections and recoveries system implementations, migrations, and upgrades are no exception.
These technologies can accelerate every stage of programme delivery, from requirements through to testing, in a way that maintains control, safeguards quality, and unlocks early value.
These tools are not a silver bullet, and they don’t replace the need for deep domain expertise, robust governance, or hands-on experience, but when used safely and effectively, can help experienced delivery teams move faster, improve accuracy, and reduce costs.
In this blog, I take a look at 3 ways they can help your system implementation, migration, or upgrade.
1. Speed up requirements gathering
Requirements gathering is often one of the most time-consuming phases of a system change. AI and LLMs can help you to speed up the following tasks, so that you can spend more time validating and challenging the requirements with stakeholders, and less time writing them from scratch:
- Extracting requirements from documentation at scale – rapidly scan and summarise legacy specs, meeting notes, and strategy documents.
- Categorising and structuring requirements – group by theme (e.g., strategies, classifications, interfaces, data) for easier prioritisation and traceability.
- Benchmarking against industry best practice – compare requirements against recognised standards (at Arum for example, we have a catalogue of over 500 core requirements) and proven approaches used across similar collections implementations, helping to flag missing components and avoid common pitfalls early.
- Analysing legacy data sets – create data catalogue requirements based on existing data sets from legacy systems.
- Building better business cases – use generative tools to articulate functional requirements and link these directly to benefits and value outcomes.
2. Improve design
Design is at the heart of every successful system implementation. LLMs can help you with the following to reduce rework, improve maintainability, and protect long-term value:
- Validating rules engine syntax and prioritisation logic – reduce configuration errors before they hit testing.
- Generating or refactoring SQL, XML, and configuration code – accelerate solution design and data preparation.
- Supporting strategy design with guardrails – ensure collections logic aligns with agreed policy, regulatory expectations, and operational objectives.
- Enforcing design principles – validate consistency across process flows, user journeys, data models, and naming conventions, which helps ensure scalable, supportable solutions.
- Enhancing design documentation – auto-generate diagrams, data dictionaries, or flow summaries to support handover and training.
3. Automate testing
Testing is a major contributor to cost and time in any implementation. By combining human-led testing with AI-supported scripting, you can achieve speed while maintaining control, through:
- Generating test cases – rapidly generate test cases based on the business scenarios from requirements, strategy and rule definitions.
- Accelerating manual testing – help users understand expected outcomes, generate test inputs, and summarise outputs automatically. Agentic AI promises to be the next stage evolution of UAT.
- Enhancing test coverage – auto-suggest test edge cases and scenarios across integrations, data quality, and user journeys.
- Assisting with reconciliation testing – support financial and data reconciliation tools with AI-enhanced logic validation, reducing manual effort.
- Streamlining defect triage – summarise logs, suggest root causes, and help testers and developers speak a common language.
Not a silver bullet, but a powerful accelerator
AI tools like Microsoft Copilot are already in use across many organisations, integrated into Teams, Excel, Word, and more. These tools are normalised in the wider business context, and collections change programmes should be no different.
However, it’s critical to apply them safely and securely. We don’t recommend exposing your data to public LLMs and always make sure you follow strict governance to ensure confidentiality, auditability, and alignment with security policies.
Success still depends on experienced teams, robust governance, and proven accelerators. But these technologies, when used responsibly, help you do the heavy lifting faster and more accurately.
This is also only the beginning. AI is evolving fast, and we’re already seeing opportunities to apply these tools across change impact assessments, data migration mapping, training and user onboarding, letter content generation, automated strategy documentation, and continuous improvement monitoring post go-live.
Not sure where to start?
If you're planning a system change or want to explore how your delivery could be faster and smarter, get in touch. With Arum, you're not just getting experience, you're getting future-ready thinking, today.
By combining our domain knowledge, implementation frameworks, and proprietary tools with the power of AI and LLMs, we help clients deliver earlier benefits, reduce project delivery time and cost, avoid rework through stronger upfront design, improve documentation quality and maintainability, and free up expert resources to focus on value-add work.
Take a look at our helpful resources below or contact us directly to discuss your needs.
Find out how we can help with system implementations
Sign up to our newsletter for more insights
Contact me directly
Request a callback from one of our experts
About the author
Matt Riddall
Senior Director – Global Delivery
Matt has been with Arum since 2008, starting as a consultant and advancing to Senior Director in 2024. With over 16 years of experience in collections and recoveries technology and operations, Matt brings a wealth of expertise in leveraging data, technology, decision-making, communications, and AI, to drive clients' success. As a leader at Arum, he is committed to delivering exceptional consulting and services to clients, ensuring excellence across all areas of the business.