Sixty-six years ago, Bernard Fagin entered debt recovery in its earliest, most formative years — not as a niche player, but as one of the people who helped invent the model. Today, three generations later, that same discipline is applied entirely to higher education.
Bernard Fagin didn't start out in collections. He started in lending — and it was there he saw the problem firsthand: institutions were extending credit with no real way to recover it when accounts went delinquent. Most lenders and institutions simply weren't built to chase down what they were owed. Bernard saw the gap in the market and built NCM to fill it, becoming one of the earliest people in the country to treat third-party receivables recovery as its own dedicated business.
In its early decades, that meant NCM served a wide range of institutions — including many major hospitals and healthcare providers across the country, recovering receivables well outside education entirely. It wasn't until the 1990s and early 2000s that NCM made a deliberate decision to go all-in on higher education, converting decades of broad receivables expertise into a single, specialized focus.
What's remained constant through every era is the discipline underneath it: treating every borrower with dignity, and giving our partners a level of reliability that a newer agency simply hasn't had the decades required to prove.
We didn't inherit our standards. We helped write them — and we're still holding ourselves to them today.
— National Credit ManagementBernard Fagin founds NCM in St. Louis after identifying a gap in the lending industry: institutions needed dedicated specialists to recover receivables they weren't built to chase down themselves.
NCM builds decades of receivables recovery experience across a range of industries, including major hospitals and healthcare providers nationwide.
NCM makes a deliberate pivot to 100% campus-based collections, converting decades of broad expertise into a single, specialized focus.
Three generations in, $1B+ recovered, and continued investment in the technology that will define this industry's next era.
These aren't new positions we've adopted to stay relevant — they're principles built over more than six decades in this business, at a scale only a track record like ours makes possible.
In the early 2000s, NCM made a deliberate choice to go all-in on higher education receivables — converting decades of broader recovery expertise into a single, specialized focus most agencies never develop.
NCM is actively building AI-driven reporting and account intelligence tools — faster, more detailed, and more customized than the generic automated reports most of the industry offers.
Our founder recognized the need for dedicated receivables recovery before it existed as its own industry — a legacy of leadership that still guides how we operate today.
Responsive, supportive, and genuinely accountable — the relationship doesn't end at onboarding. It's the reason our client partnerships last decades, not quarters.
NCM exists to deliver the nation's highest standard of customer service in educational debt collection — full stop. That means preserving the human dignity of every borrower we speak with, and protecting the reputation of every college and university we represent. We don't see those two goals in tension. We've spent 66 years proving they're the same goal.