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Have you filled out your bracket yet? If not, you better get on it soon since the big dance starts in just over an hour. It’s always interesting how so many people have unique strategies when deciding on the teams that will advance and eventually be crowned champions of college hoops. Some people have watched so many games this season that they can make educated decisions. While others, like me, find other less analytical ways to decide since they haven’t seen at least half of the teams actually play. Almost everyone knows or has heard a story of someone who won a pool because of picking something like their favorite mascots or colors. The point is that there is no single method or formula that leads to victory. While some people have won with crazy strategies, it’s best go with what works best for you. For digital lending success, it sort of like that – although the stakes are much higher. From the online or mobile application process to the decisoning, workflow and funding processes, financial institutions everywhere are still searching for the right strategy to survive and advance among today’s fierce competition. That’s why we’re here to help. This week’s blog post features three more of the most important best practices every financial institution needs to consider when evaluating technology and processes:

If you have been working in the financial services sector for a long time, you can probably remember the days where every area of your institution was a separate entity. For example, you may have had separate divisions for retail banking, private banking, trusts, investments, consumer lending, and indirect lending, and each of those really didn’t have much knowledge of the other business units. It was very common to have completely separate IT systems for managing the accounts generated and maintained within each area. Most likely, it could’ve been argued that this compartmentalization may have even fueled the fire of competitiveness within your organization in a way that limited organic growth.  While some of these dynamics have simply been a statement of corporate culture, it would also be reasonable to assume that limitations in technology have also fostered these characteristics within organizations. We have now reached an age when that is no longer true. Today, it would be fair to say that if your organization maintains this inter-departmental segmentation, it does so despite the industry-recognized benefits of tearing down those proverbial walls. Lending is a great example of where we can still see this handicap.

Digital maturity is something almost every business – regardless of industry – struggles to attain. According to an article late last year in Entrepreneur, a good number of them make the mistake of simply equating it with technology implemented. When in reality, technology is just a catalyst for much deeper business changes.

For financial institutions searching for the right loan origination system to fit their operations and strategic plans, finding a platform that offers robust, yet configurable, workflows is a must. With today’s customers and members requiring as much automation and convenience as possible, institutions must tailor their lending and deposit account opening operations to meet those needs. After all, the less focus spent administering processes means more attention can be devoted to identifying and capitalizing on growth opportunities and strengthening customer/member relationships.  Here are three factors to consider when judging the potential effectiveness of a loan origination system’s workflow processing capabilities and how it would fit your operations: