Customer Success Story
MeridianLink Digital Lending Experience Fuels Online Lending Growth & Efficiency
How D.L. Evans Bank Centralized Digital Lending & Improved Customer Experience
Headquarters: Burley, ID
Branch locations: 38
Managed Assets: $3 Billion
The Challenge
Increasing Digital Applications & Improving Response Times
D.L. Evans Bank is a local community bank offering an expansive portfolio of products and services to customers across Southern Idaho and Northern Utah— including commercial loans, Ag loans, consumer loans, real estate and mortgages loans, as well as consumer and business credit cards. Although the bank has grown tremendously, managing about $3 billion in assets, D.L. Evans Bank maintains the hometown community bank spirit.
D.L. Evans Bank wanted to expand relationships with customers by offering more services through digital channels, improving internal processes, and speeding up turnaround times for customer inquiries and applications. Optimizing their online lending solution with faster underwriting, funding, and inquiry response times meant the bank would need to tap into a more efficient system for routing, responding to, and decisioning loan applications.
The Solution
MeridianLink® Consumer & MeridianLink® Portal
D.L. Evans Bank evaluated other loan origination options in the market, but the end-to-end digital integration and loan origination capabilities of MeridianLink® Consumer and MeridianLink® Portal was the solution that allowed D.L. Evans Bank to digitally optimize their lending experience across all loan types—creating internal efficiencies and improving the customer experience with enhanced lending functionality and speed.
Hear from Robert about MeridianLink Consumer & MeridianLink Portal
Why D.L. Evans Bank Selected MeridianLink Consumer and MeridianLink Portal
Third-party integrations that eliminate redundancies enable staff to manage everything from one platform.
Seamless, automated front and back-end support enables the bank to route user-friendly online applications to a central virtual department for more efficient processing.
Streamlined, speedy application and decisioning process increased application volume while decreasing turnaround time.
The Results
Enhancing Online Digital Lending Center & Faster Customer Response Times
Using MeridianLink Consumer and MeridianLink Portal, D.L. Evans Bank built a centralized digital department in which all online applications could be routed, resulting in fast decisioning and response rates for customer inquiries.
MeridianLink’s extensive library of integration partners enabled D.L. Evans Bank to benefit from even more functionality, further increasing the speed of processing applications for all products. And with the streamlined ability to query and filter loan applications, D.L. Evans Bank was able to improve underwriting processes and serve customers faster.
Upon launching the Online Lending Center in 2021, D.L. Evans Bank processed 65 applications for roughly $740,000. That number rocketed to 309 customers totaling just shy of $7 million in requests by 2022, making the Online Center the second largest of all branches in terms of volume. By Q1 of 2023, the Online Center received 173 applications, currently leading the entire bank by almost triple the amount of any other branch location.
In addition to the increase application volume through the Online Center, the turnaround times decreased significantly. In Q4 of 2022, loan response time was 33%+ faster online versus in-branch, taking just 26 minutes compared to 39 minutes in a physical branch. Average funding time decreased by a whopping 60%, dropping from 15 days to just 6 days.
