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I’ve been in this situation and you can make repayment contingent upon deleting the negative remarks. As in you send me a letter certifying you’ll delete the remark, and I will remit payment.

If they refuse then you can just refuse to pay until they relent. Their only alternative is to take you to court or sell to the next collection agency down the line. Creditors and collection agencies won’t take that action except as an absolute last resort.

One of the challenges with this is that technically the TOS between a creditor and the CRA forbids the practice of "pay for delete". So you may get lucky, but oftentimes, you may not.

They do have to mark it as paid at least under the FCRA if you are in the US.

Rephrase: my credit was a disaster in my 20's. I paid off dozens of collections accounts in my 30s. All of them were removed.

My personal experience has been that it is 100% true that, if paid in full, the item is removed.

Better?