Digital lending best practices continue to be a major focal point for many financial institutions as they strive to optimize the mobile user experience for their customers and members. As we’ve previously discussed, this often goes beyond the functionality of the loan origination system, itself, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that there are several key factors every institution must consider when evaluating whether its loan software can help it meet its goals.
This week’s blog post features three more of the most important best practices every financial institution needs to consider when evaluating digital lending technology and processes:
- Detailed Summary of Loan Terms with Approval: Once the loan is approved, your digital solution needs to clearly communicate the details of the offer back to the consumer. Information is empowering. What details should they receive? Whether that means including rates, terms, stipulations and amounts, it is really up to your institution. But you should consider options that give you control over this content so you can customize this to fit your needs. Regardless of what you decide to display, this is still an important part of the application process.
- Product-level Field Configurability: No single application will fit everything that you offer. It is important that along with branding your website, you should be able to differentiate your data collection requirements to meet the specific product being requested. This allows for a more streamlined process for unsecured products versus requiring more data for more complex requests such as home equity loan products. Without this flexibility, you will be forced to expose fields in the application based on the product of greatest need, which will increase abandonment rates. Make sure that your solution offers this level of control.
- Open API: Processing consumer requests for new products and services may require quite a few steps when you consider the full lifecycle of the application. For both your individual consumers and your staff, navigating these steps should be as streamlined and simple as possible, regardless of whether a loan or deposit account is being processed. Think of your loan origination system and deposit account opening platforms as automated ecosystems that need to be able to communicate with each other and, in many cases, with other systems your financial institution uses. Having access to a robust API is critical to allow you to be nimble without having to rely on time-consuming enhancements from your platform provider to accommodate new workflow needs. Planning your own integrations will allow you to take advantage of emerging new channels and fintech that can refer applications easily into your loan and deposit ecosystems.
Credit Union Case Study
Streamlining and optimizing the application process is critical to digital and mobile success these days. Despite successful lending programs and efforts to expand its membership base in recent years, leadership at Associated Credit Union identified a need to improve mobile acquisitions and processing of applications both within the branch as well as outside the branch.
If you’d like to learn more about how this client identified its challenges and addressed them for both immediate and long-term success, please click the button below to download our complimentary case study.
