Thank You. Please Come Again: Auto-Funding for Consumer Loans & Credit Cards

Picture yourself. It is 2:00 p.m. You have been slammed all morning with customer requests, staff meetings, and past-due reports. You haven’t had a chance to grab a bite to eat since you shoveled down that 100-calorie peach yogurt and cup of coffee this morning. You crave a burger and fries. But you only have 30 minutes before your next video call.

You hop in the car and head to your favorite fast-food restaurant. You pull up to the speaker and place your order accepting the cross-sell offer to ‘SUPER-SIZE.’ Moving up to the first window, you pay with the app on your phone. Your digital receipt pops up immediately.

You are now salivating, dreaming of that all beef patty, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions and sesame seed bun. Rolling up to the pickup window, you are so ready to claim your paper sack of foil wrapped goodness surrounded by crispy, salty strips of golden nirvana. You reach your hand through the car window toward the smiling attendant only to be told that you must park and come inside to pick-up your order. What!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

That same experience relates to customer/member experiences when digitally applying for a consumer loan or credit card today.

Existing Drive-Through Process

Currently anyone can submit their loan or credit card application from their smartphone, tablet or laptop from anywhere you can get a wireless signal. A financial institution can do an automatic identification authentication or verification immediately upon receipt.

The underwriting and decisioning process can be as frictionless as possible with automation doing the approval in real-time. Electronic signature is there for the client to complete their end of the process, while munching on a chicken sandwich and side salad.

Then comes the process of booking to the core and fund disbursement and everything grinds to the pace of sucking an extra-thick dark chocolate milkshake through a limp paper straw.

Auto-booking and auto-funding are the missing hot apple pie and soft-serve vanilla cone in the digital loan process. But what if those loan process-ending desserts have been found? What if the fully digital consumer experience is now on the menu?

With these two pieces of back office automation your financial institution could:

1. Provide a better user experience—Customers and member would be delighted to see how simple and fast a process it was to get their funds and not go into the branch or drive-through to get it. People remember great experiences.
2. Improve speed of the loan process—Automate as much of the LOS process as you wanted, especially if it is for a customer or member who easily passes your loan criteria. Your staff needs to touch nothing. In a pandemic environment, that is especially critical.
3. Better use of staff time (reduce work on staff)—For ‘no-brainer’ loan approvals, why use staff time to handle booking and disbursement. Use your staff for more important tasks that cannot be automated.

New Digital Lending Menu Items

In the latest release of MeridianLink’s loan origination system, auto-booking and auto-funding have been added as new product back-office automation functionality. It works for both consumer loans and credit card disbursements.

There are three requirements to employ our LOS into your digital strategy for consumer loans:

1. Your financial institution must use Application Portal, MeridianLink’s digital lending and account opening gateway.
2. Applicant must be an existing member/customer of your financial institution.
3. Your financial institution must have consistent deposit account setup available for all members/customers.

There are three requirements to employ this into a digital strategy for credit cards:

1. Your financial institution must use Application Portal.
2. Applicant must be an existing member/customer or your financial institution.
3. Your financial institution must use one of seven credit card provider vendors.

Not-So Secret Recipe

MeridianLink created a six-minute video providing the highlights of this new auto-booking and auto-disbursement (auto-funding) functionality available for personal loans and credit cards using Application Portal, along with the MeridianLink® Consumer loan origination system.

View the video below or click this link.

Completing the full digital lending experience with auto-booking and auto-funding should be a definite consideration moving forward in your online strategy. When it comes to the best digital lending and account opening journey for your financial institution, MeridianLink provides you the tools to have it your way.

Stay safe and add extra pickles, please.