When it comes to digital lending, it’s not enough to just have a presence. As technology evolves, consumer demand shifts, and lending strategies expand competition within the industry grows seemingly exponentially with every new day. Technology plays a key role in staying competitive. Institutions not only need to have reliable loan origination systems in place, but also tools that provide necessary levels of automation and configurability to maximize efficiency and profits. Traditional loan origination platforms can’t do all this alone.
To help illustrate this point, here are a few best practices to help ensure your online web application is providing the most ROI for your portfolio:
- Simple is better, less is more: Remember, it’s all about the consumer. Institutions sometimes overlook this mantra when building application forms. They far too often include too many fields as part of the application process. Asking for too much information can lead to higher abandonment rates. Keep your applications short. This allows for quicker submissions. Try to capture just enough information to pull credit and evaluate the applicant’s capacity for rendering approvals using your existing conditional workflows.
For example, asking for collateral up front is not always needed if you stipulate conditions related to the vehicle LTV or the residence having a valid appraisal, title, and flood search. Remember that receiving leads with less information is often better than not receiving an application at all.
- Automate, automate, and automate some more: Reducing the quantity of information that a consumer needs to manually type in can make all the difference between an approved loan and an abandoned application. Leverage information provided by the consumer to make their lives easier. If your application allows drivers licenses or IDs to be scanned, you can save valuable time for your applicant by prefilling in their information like name, address, and date of birth. Continuing on this trend: Don’t be afraid to automate other portions of the application. In-application document signing, instant approvals, and automatic record creation on core systems can help continue an applicant’s seamless, frictionless experience. Having information fill-in automatically, getting approved for an account, signing the required documents, and then receiving the account records can be done in less than 10 minutes on a mobile device; that is the pinnacle of customer experience.
- Test versions and configurability: This is an absolute must-have for any system. Having a corresponding test instance of each live version of your web application allows your institution to properly test changes before they are published into production. If tests go according to plan, then your system should allow for a user-friendly process to copy your configurations from test to your production version. This sandbox, as it is sometimes called, also doubles as a backup for your live version. Your system should allow you to change configurations on-the-fly, whether that is hiding a field from the application, renaming an existing field, or adding a new product to your digital lending offerings.
While these suggestions are hardly groundbreaking or radical in nature, they sometimes get overlooked as institutions configure their online channels. Consumers are often quick to abandon an application if they feel it is tedious and onerous. So keep these three best practices as reminders to help your institution increase efficiency both internally for implementation of program changes as well as on the consumer’s end.
As stated earlier, it’s impossible to ignore that the technology you leverage still plays a major role. If your loan origination system isn’t fully equipped to handle the functionality listed above as well as the robust decisioning capabilities needed for an effective digital presence, then competing for business via the Web will be even more difficult.
The Application Portal platform offers as much or as little configurability needed to go with unmatched online and mobile functionality to drive growth opportunities for lenders of any size. To request a consultation with our experts regarding Application Portal or any other of our solutions, please click the button below.
Photo Credit: Didriks
