Decisioning Transformed: Elevate Lending Experiences With MeridianLink

Introduction 

Carrie LaRue 

00:01 – 02:15 

Alright. I think we’ll go ahead and get started. 

Hello, and thank you for joining us today for our webinar, decisioning transformed, elevate lending experiences with MeridianLink. During this session, you will hear how advanced decisioning for MeridianLink Consumer can help boost your bottom line and drive stellar experiences. 

I’m Carrie LaRue, a member of the MeridianLink marketing team, and I will be the moderator for today’s event. Before we get started, I’d like to share a few housekeeping items. 

This session will be recorded. If you object, please disconnect at this time. 

Throughout the session, we encourage you to submit questions using the q and a tab located at the top right of your screen. Questions not answered during today’s session will be followed up directly by your MeridianLink account executive. 

Near the end of the webinar, you will have the opportunity to easily request more information about advanced decisioning and other solutions from MeridianLink. And lastly, you will be receiving an email with a link to this on demand recording. 

Our presenters for today are Mike Higgins, AVP underwriting at Space Coast Credit Union. We’re excited to have Mike join us today. 

Space Coast has worked with MeridianLink for nearly a decade to support their ongoing digital growth initiatives, and recently, they deployed advanced decisioning for MeridianLink Consumer. In addition to Mike, we have Brandon Sisol, director of product management at MeridianLink, Brie Hertel, director of business consulting practice at MeridianLink. 

And as a publicly traded company, we share our disclaimer about forward-looking statements. And one additional item, we want to remind everyone to register for MeridianLink Live, which is occurring April 29 through May 2 in Nashville, Tennessee. 

This three-day exclusive event includes networking opportunities, keynote speakers, breakout sessions on topics from Meridian like products to industry insights and more. For your convenience, I’ll provide the link to register within the chat. 

Now we have a lot of valuable information to share, so let’s get started. Brandon, I’ll turn it over to you. 

Importance of Advanced Decisioning  

Bandon Sisola 

02:15 – 20:18 

Thanks, Carrie. Good morning and good afternoon to everyone. 

I’m really excited to be here to talk to you today about advanced decisioning and some of the new things that we’re bringing forward with MeridianLink Consumer, in regard to how we can help your automated decisioning now and into the future. As far as the agenda goes, what we’re going to start with is talking about the why you should care about high performance decisioning models, then go a little bit into the what MeridianLink is offering to help you with that to do a lift on your decisioning capabilities. 

We’ll hear from Space Coast about their firsthand insights into using this new tool of advanced decisioning within MeridianLink Consumer. Then we’ll hear from Bree on how you can utilize their best practices to scale advanced decisioning and execute on that and continue to refine and iterate over time with your decisioning model. 

And then finally, at the end, we’ll wrap up with some key takeaways. And as time allows, we’ll have some q and a as well. 

We do have a jam-packed session, so I do anticipate that the time for q and a may be a bit limited, but we will get back to you either way regardless of if after if it’s after through a written form as well. So, jumping right in, when we’re looking at some of the priorities for credit unions and banks in 2024, looking at a survey done by the digital banking report, the number one goal and priority for financial institutions was a focus on digital transformation. 

And if you’ve attended any of MeridianLink’s webinars in the last couple of quarters here, we’ve been really focusing on this. Of course, being a digital loan origination and account opening solution platform, this is something that we focus on, but we really wanted to help our customers understand that digital transformation can be difficult. 

It’s not something that you can flip on overnight. It’s something that you need to have a road map on how you’re trying to attack that, where you’re trying to improve, and then continue to improve over time and identify new opportunities as they arise. 

And, really, this is the focus of all financial institutions now and into the future. As banking has moved away from reliance on relationships and the community aspect where you would go in previously and go to your local credit union or your local bank, and you would apply for an auto loan. 

Today, a lot of people, especially when we’re talking about the younger generations in either Gen z or millennials, are going online, going to Google, and typing in auto loan and looking at the search results from there and trying to see what the best opportunity for them is. So, you’re really competing on that digital experience from an end-to-end perspective. 

And why we’re talking about digital transformation and automated decisioning here is that those two go hand in hand. When you’re talking about the end-to-end digital experience, the automated decision really makes up how that experience is going to be presented to the applicant. 

When someone goes online to apply for an auto loan, they’re expecting that instant decision. And if they have to wait for a result to come back a day, two days, three days later, they may look elsewhere because it’s really easy to go and do a search and find another institution that could give them an instant decision and get them that instant gratification. 

So, specifically, talking about automated decisioning, in the next couple of slides here, we’re going to be referencing a McKinsey and Company, survey that they did where they looked and found a number of different financial institutions that really focused on optimizing their decisioning models and were able to see some real benefits from that. The first of which is an increase in top line revenue. 

So those institutions that focus on new decision models, whether that is, refining the one that they already have or potentially going out and looking at third party, add ons for things like AI machine learning based custom scoring or decision models, we’re able to see a revenue increase of five to 15%. And that’s through the higher acceptance rates. 

As you get higher acceptance rates because of automation, then you’re able to not only get the interest income, but then have additional optional add ons, things like insurance products that allow you for additional upsells for noninterest income. And so that can really have an impact on your institution on institution on the bottom line by maximizing that top line revenue for you. 

And then going back to what I talked about of the digital experience being the battleground now and into the future, it really helps with that customer experience. It’s going to help with the stickiness of your applicants or your members of being able to provide that instant decision and potentially be able to cross sell or upsell them into additional products into the future. 

The second aspect is really around credit loss rates. So, the previous aspect is focusing on, okay, you’re going to have a higher throughput rate when you’re looking at the filter of the applicants coming in. 

The other flip side is as you’re able to better tailor your decisioning to your target markets in, in looking at specific niches and different segments, you’re able to reduce the credit loss rates by 20 to 40% because you’re able to identify specific subsegments that you can then automate, through decisioning rather than having to rely on manual underwriting. And manual underwriting is always going to be there. 

We’re a long way out, if ever, from having full automation in decisioning. There’s still going to have to, at the end of the day, be a certain percentage of applications that an underwriter is going to need to take a look at and make a decision. 

However, if you can really automate certain portions that you’ve seen that could potentially adversely impact your credit loss rates, then you can help to minimize that aspect as well and, overall, create a better picture for your underwriting as well. And then next up, of course, with automation, you’re going to get an efficiency improvement. 

So new decisioning models had resulted in 20 to 40% improved efficiency for those that have been implemented. That’s going to reduce costs. 

That can also lead to direct bet, improved member and customer satisfaction where your underwriters are able to focus on, some areas where they need to dig a little bit deeper into the credit file or the application to be able to provide that, final decision and improve the experience overall for your applicants and for your staff as well because they’re spending less time on obvious applicants that are coming in. That could be automated either through an approval or a decline decision by using an improved automated decisioning model. 

And to tie it all together, an automated decisioning model and in continuing to improve it are a necessary tenant of any strategy for financial institutions into the future here. There are so many new technologies that are coming out now. 

AI, machine learning, is very much in vogue right now, and that’s only going to increase as the capabilities increase year over year. We’re on an exponential logarithmic growth with AI capabilities into the future. 

We don’t even know, and it’s hard for our human brains to comprehend what that’s going to be able to do a year from now, five years from now, or more. But what we can do is take the tools that we have today and see how we can incorporate them into making a better high-performance decisioning model. 

Looking at things like your analytics, being able to pull in the big data that you have set up at data warehouse, working with a company like MeridianLink that can help you organize that and come up with actionable insights from that. But then also looking at how you can leverage some things like partners like artificial intelligence and machine learning, whether that be a custom score, decisioning model, etcetera, and incorporate that into your workflow to be able to improve and iterate over time. 

So that’s a bit of a why you should care about really improving your decisioning. Now focusing on what and how MeridianLink can help with that, we are introducing a new functionality into our platform, into MeridianLink one, specifically talking about the MeridianLink consumer loan origination system. 

I’m not going to go into detail on what that is. I think everyone attending this webinar knows what MeridianLink consumer is. 

But specifically, when we’re talking about the decisioning model within the platform, we’re now going to have two different decisioning models available for usage. So, what we have today, what we’re calling standard decisioning, what essentially everyone is using is going to be a go forward solution in our platform. 

So, I want to be very clear about that. There are no plans to sunset the decisioning you’re making today. 

These are meant to be two different models available within the platform that fulfill different purposes. Our standard decisioning today is meant to be fairly easy to set up and also easy to maintain and can get you to where you want to go if you’re talking forty, fifty, and sometimes a little bit above 50% on automated decisioning rates. 

And that’s really pushing it, but it is possible, and we have customers that are doing north of 50% today. Advanced decisioning is meant to be an alternative to standard decisioning for those that really want to get granular and build in a lot of, logic layers into their decisioning models. 

So, with the standard decisioning mod module today, its product configuration based. You have your product. 

Within that product, you have a 150, 175 different criteria that you can choose from. You can choose how many of those you want to use, but the logic is simplified in that it’s a giant and statement where all of the criteria that are within that product have to be true. 

Otherwise, that product is referred. And there’s really no mitigating factors or logic tied on top of that to be able to say, well, if DTI is between 45 to 50% and FICO is above a 700, then I still want to proceed with an approval. 

That’s not possible today through standard decisioning. You would have to set up a different product, and then that can end up with a bit of product bloat on your side from an administrative standpoint. 

So advanced decisioning, what we wanted to do from the vision was provide an alternative where people could get in, get super granular, and get to have highly complex decisioning logic. It may not be as easy to maintain or set up, and I think we can, we have a testament to that in this call. 

But you can see lift there in the automation capabilities compared to that. But breaking down advanced decisioning because it’s not just one monolithic project, we broke it out into three different components, and you can see them here. 

The first one is additional criteria, and this is applicable to both standard decisioning and advanced decisioning. So going to the underwriting attributes here, I’m not going to list these all out, but these are available for everyone to use today. 

It’s already in your system as long as you’re on a fairly recent release. Then you’re going to have access to all of these new underwriting criteria, in standard decisioning, and they’re also available in our advanced decisioning as well. 

That also means you can use it in classic or modern experiences. The second aspect was a custom expression builder, and this is where we get into only for modern experience. 

So, this was based on feedback from our customers that the ratios and the underwriting criteria within our platform were not flexible to institutional needs. So, the DTI that is used within MeridianLink consumer is the DTI as MeridianLink coded it. 

There’s no real wiggle room there, and you’re not able to go in as a customer and an administrator and change that yourself. With the custom expression builder, you’re now able to go in and essentially make your own ratios. 

And you can see the screenshot here on the side. You’re able to choose between about 25 different fields that you can use in the expression and then build your ratio from there. 

So, you can take monthly debt. You can take student loan payment. 

If I want to discount that, I can say, okay. I’m going to multiply it by point five so I can discount it by 50%. 

I can then select monthly income, divide that by loan amount, for example, and you can actually build out that expression in real time. You can see the preview within the page, and it’s going to show you exactly what that’s going to look like. 

And then there’s also testing capabilities where you can take that custom expression and see what it would calculate out to in a particular test application so you can reference and ensure that the ratio is configured as expected. So, this is something, again, that is available for modern experience. 

It’s available for both standard and advanced decisions. So, I know that can get a little bit confusing. 

There’s a matrix later in the slides here. But the attributes that I talked about, that’s available to everyone. 

Custom expression builder is available to everyone on modern regardless of if you’re using standard or advanced decisioning. And then the next item, which is really the main component of the advanced decisioning module, is the decision tree strategy. 

So rather than having the standard decisioning model, which is a little bit more top down where you start with the product and then you select the different product criteria and you, strategize and design that way, Instead, we wanted to allow you to start with the building blocks of the decisioning model with rules and being able to really customize those rules. So, you could see the UI here of how you can build out a decisioning flow, and that’s essentially just a decision that you’re going to come to. 

It starts with, by building rules. And rules are highly customizable using the advanced conditioning logic builder that you’re familiar with. 

It’s an enhanced version of it, and you can see the new look and feel in the upper right image here. But it essentially allows you to get highly granular with the individual rule. 

So rather than just having a FICO score greater than 700, you could have logic layers within that rule itself. You could say FICO score is greater than 700, but let’s say you’re using a custom score, or FICO is greater than 600 and custom score is greater than 500. 

And that would end up having the same evaluation within the decisioning module itself. So that piece is much more configurable than the criteria that are available in standard decisioning. 

So, you go in, you build out your rules, then you can organize those into rule groups. The example that is always my go to is auto decline. 

So, you could build out a couple of very simple rules like applicant age are greater than 18, FICO is greater than six fifty, and let’s say that’s your hard cutoff, and put that into your global auto decline rule group. And now as part of the decisioning flow where, essentially, we’re just looking step by step and then taking an action based on what the evaluation was, you could start with a global auto decline rule evaluation and say, if any one of these rules fails, I want to immediately go to a decline. 

Otherwise, go on to step number two, and then we’re going to start to evaluate some additional rules and rule groups. So, as you can imagine, this is very much a whiteboard approach, rather than the standard decisioning, which is you have a box that you can select from things within the box. 

So, with that said, it’s much more powerful, but it’s also going to require much more of a lift, from a setup and, again, a maintenance standpoint to ensure that it is working as you want and expect. So, this is the matrix that I was referring to earlier. 

We won’t go through all of this, but you could see overall advanced decisioning pretty much has all of the standard functionality like cross sell prequalification, automated underwriting through the different channels, but then more on top of this standard decisioning. The one difference is that you don’t have the preset decision templates, so you don’t start with those rules prebuilt for you. 

You have to start from scratch. In the future, we may look at something at, like, having some preset rules that you can go in and then tinker and tailor with. 

We’re going to be working through that as we work with our our pilots and get them into production. But, really, again, it is a whiteboard approach, so it allows for maximum creativity and customizability. 

And so, looking at advanced decisioning, really tying this back into the why, you’re going to be able to improve your auto decisioning through advanced decisioning compared to standard decisioning. I think the question really comes down to, what does that look like for you from a cost benefit analysis standpoint? How much can you lift with your standard decisioning? Can you get 5% additional increased automation? That’s probably something you want to focus on first. 

So, this is going to be a conversation that you have with your account executive to see if this is the right fit for you. A lot of people, if you’re doing ten, fifteen, even 20% automated decisioning, you probably want to focus on optimizing standard decisioning before jumping to automated or advanced decisioning there. 

Potentially, look at some of our third-party partners like Zest, Scienaptic, etc., to improve that. So, with that said, I’m going to introduce Mike Higgins from Space Coast, and he’s going to share some of his experiences of why they decided to, be one of the guinea pigs with advanced decisioning and, their experience with it so far. 

Mike? 

Space Coast Credit Union’s Experience  

Mike Higgins 

20:18 – 25:46 

Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. 

Hi, everybody. Kind of our, gist of what we have now. 

We do we’re $9,000,000,000. We have 65 locations, and we have two centralized lending locations. 

So, we do not really lean on the branches very much. People go in, we can close loans there, but, ideally, everything comes to two central spots. 

That’s been our driver for years and years, and then the pandemic drove it even more. We didn’t really need the branches, but we wanted to be efficient. 

We wanted things to not go back and forth, and we wanted to get rid of some of the low hanging fruit. Like, our instant decisioning has gotten better over the years with Meridian. 

When we came off of CRIF, it was awful. When we started with MeridianLink consumer, it got much better. 

So, we’ve gradually kind of stepped it up. We added Zest about two years ago, and then this kind of led to advanced decisioning. 

They had reached out to us and we’re like, hey. There are some things we can do to change. 

And that conversation didn’t go very far because we were super excited, and we’re like, yes. We want to be able to adjust things a little bit more. 

We like the if and part because we just see a lot of loans that come through that we would approve anyway, but they were stopping, having to wait. To Brandon’s point, those people may have moved on already, especially from our dealer network. 

So, we felt like we really needed to try to improve that, and this was a great way for us to do it. We have probably 450 dealers. 

We’re very indirect heavy. So, on top of our regular members coming the online way, our dealers, as everyone knows, want answers now. 

So, this ideally will help us get those and grab those more. We do a lot of as plus and a paper, so we just felt like we were wasting a lot of time having people look at deals that we are going to do, and the numbers sort of bore it out. 

I think we approved manually 95% of deals that were getting stopped that were in the a plus and a category, and we were just like, it’s just not worth the time. The other driver was our processing area. 

They have goals just like us. They want to try to close loans within a day, sometimes two at the most. 

This has improved that as well. Like, our you know, ideally, the less hands that have to touch it, the better. 

We’ve become much more comfortable with just the instant decisions, so this was just the next gradual step for us. When I first started, a lot of people were like, oh, we don’t want to do instant approval and decline. 

We’re going to miss out on loans. But we figured out, like, it’s just we get a lot of also besides all the a plus and the a, we get a lot of apps that just need to be declining and go. 

So, we’ve seen that as well. The underwriters can work on the stuff in the middle, but that that was really the driver between the two. 

As far as the actual process of it is, Bree and Sabika and Jared, the team at MeridianLink are great. We work super well with them, so that was another reason why we said yes. 

We’ve done some other projects with them. They’ve gone really well. 

So, we really had no worries about that part. When we started the process, like, it’s very detailed. 

We’ve spent a few months going through every product, every piece, every stage. I will tell anyone that does this, make sure that you test, test, test. 

We did a lot of testing. When we went live, you know, just like anything, there were a few that didn’t work, but Brie and her team jumped right on it. 

We were able to make kind of make corrections on the fly. And we did this about two weeks ago. 

So that that was huge for us. We would not have done this if we didn’t have the faith that, like, they were going to be there to help us. 

I think we have people in different time zones. Bree is probably the furthest one out from us, and she was up early, up late. 

They were there each time fixing every little thing that we would see. All of our teams were a little bit skeptical about this because, you know, with anything, they don’t like to see you taking it out of their hands. 

But they do like the advanced decision flow because it will tell you as you go, this is the reason it failed. It’ll tell you, like, approved, approved, approved, and it’ll stop it. 

Or it may continue on, but it tells you what’s going on, and they like that. So those were, you know, the main drivers and what motivated us with it. 

We’ve been on it for about two weeks. I told Bree just before we started today, I checked the incident approval numbers, and for our autos, it’s up three and a half percent in two weeks. 

So that’s a good sign for us. We don’t really have a goal in mind for, like, what it has to be. 

We were just looking for improvement over what we’re doing now and for it to stay consistent. So, credit cards and personal loans, there’s a little bit of a difference too not much, but our volume is not super high right now in those two areas. 

So, I’m not going to worry too much yet. We want to get a longer a longer run, but the autos have looked much better, and it’s encouraging. 

And we’re also seeing a lot of a lot of the stuff that should be declined is going to the decline and going away because the I’ll tell you the first day it went live, our teams were emailing and asking what’s happening, why aren’t there as many apps, where did they go. So, it’s we knew right away that it was working, and now it’s kind of leveled off to our teams. 

They’re, like, back to doing their normal stuff. They’re trusting it, and they’re not it’s kind of out of sight out of mind for them. 

Space Coast Credit Union Q&A 

Carrie LaRue 

25:46 – 26:03 

Lots of great information, Mike. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. 

Before we got in, you know, I said we are going to do a QA towards the end. There are two questions that came up specifically for you. 

Okay. What core do you use? 

Mike Higgins 

26:03 – 26:06 

We use Fiserv DNA. 

Carrie LaRue 

26:06 – 26:20 

Okay. And then the other one is, did you find deploying advanced decisioning caused you to restructure your loan product offering in the MeridianLink? Did it reduce the number of products you had to maintain? 

Mike Higgins 

26:20 – 26:38 

It did not. We kept everything the same. 

We have every single product we had before, and we can attest to it. We have a lot of products and a lot of little different terms and rates and bumps and all kinds of different things, and they were able to work around all of that. 

Carrie LaRue 

26:38 – 26:46 

Great story. We’re really excited for you, for your successes and can’t wait to share more. 

Mike Higgins 

26:46 – 27:02 

Us too. We appreciate being one of the first. 

I’ll tell you; Bree knows it. Our teams are very excited to be first and get things out there. 

They’re super competitive about it. So, they all did a really great job, and we appreciate all the help that we got from Bree’s team. 

Carrie LaRue 

27:02 – 27:04 

Fantastic. Yeah. 

Thank you. 

Advanced Decisioning Implementation Journey 

Brie Hertel 

27:04 – 35:13 

So much, Mike, for the partnership. So grateful to have gone through another journey with you and your organization and really grateful to be able to share exactly what that journey looks like. 

So, what I’d love to now share with you is, of course, taking you through, essentially, the journey that we went through with Mike and the space team. So going into advanced decisioning, as you’ve heard from Brandon, it is a completely different platform, in the sense of how you address it. 

Instead of having predefined fields and just placing your organization’s values in them, it is really starting from scratch and being able to be creative and, again, create a flow that helps the organization succeed. One of the things that, again, made, Space Coast a perfect partner in this is with working with them over the years, we knew, for the various services that we’ve had with them, they’ve been admin pro clients, and we’ve been with them since their initial implementation. 

We always knew that there was more as far as what they had ingrained in their policies and procedures. They did have, if then else, strategies that were baked into their procedures. 

They had very dynamic, decisioning concepts that just weren’t fully realized in the standard, decisioning models. So, when we were looking for, again, a partner in this, they were the perfect pick because we knew that there were things that could be unlocked in their policies and procedures on this platform. 

So, what we, again, kind of developed was a new service offering advanced decisioning enhanced conversion, and this is what that looks like. So, my apologies here. 

It looks like there’s I had ordered change to touch. But what we had essentially encountered with the organization is that we first really sat down with their policies and procedures and started fresh in their advanced physician build. 

We wanted to make sure that we were acting as a translator to those policies and procedures all the way into the granularity and the water flow effect that their procedures already had. Their policy has already been stated. 

So, by acting as that translator, we then, of course, were able to build that for them and to bring them into the environment to test that out. So, essentially, what we did again was we knew that this is a much more complex, powerful, and flexible system, and we wanted to make sure that, again, the organization’s vision of how they end their practices of lending were brought forward. 

So, we did go through and identify, again, what in their policies and procedures was unaddressed, how could we build to make sure to account for their specific water flow, effect of, okay. Well, if they have passed this now, let’s get into this. 

And to keep the application flowing all the way through to a decision that matched to mirrored how they would interact with that application. We did also provide some deliverables with added further transparency. 

We had a visual workflow map that allowed them to watch the journey of the application, in addition to the incredible flows that are already present in the application itself. So, allowing them to see what they should anticipate in the journey and verify that for their testing. 

We also provided expertise. So, by having our admin pro plus team support them through this, we knew where things were. 

What Mike was speaking to earlier is when they did encounter a question or concern or we needed to make an adjustment, having that expertise to quickly engage with the build, identify, and make that adjustment so that they could continue forward was valuable. When you are in a white space field like this, there is most definitely an interconnectivity that has to be taken into account for change. 

As Brandon shared earlier, there are steps, if you will. So, if you make a change in a step, that can influence the remaining steps that come after. 

So, it is really important to make sure that you have experts that are touching, supporting, and maintaining the platform. So that again is what we were grateful to be able to provide for Mike and the team to have the level of success that we’ve had so far, and we’ll be with them on this journey going forward as well. 

So, again, just really wanting to let you know that we do have the ability to partner with you and do the same. So if you are looking for the opportunity to unlock your policies and procedures and to have them fully realized in the advanced decisioning engine, this project type is available for your organization so that you can, again, lean on our expertise, allow us to be the translators, and then to invite you into your new environment to test it out. 

It is important to have that type of expertise, especially, again, in a, decisioning engine like what we now have available to you. And, we are happy to stay on with you in a long term sense and continue that maintenance so that, again, as you continue to iteratively grow and, develop additional if and then and else, scenarios that we are capturing those for you and helping make sure to bring that forward so that those instant decision numbers continue to rise. 

And that again is just from a business consulting perspective. We do have, also analytic practices. 

So, if you are saying, hey. As an organization, we are leveraging our capacity, our policies and procedures to their fullest. 

But instant decisioning increase is still a need of the organization. We do have native solutions for and our analytic practice. 

They can work with you to actually identify and create the opportunity to increase your instant decisioning. So, again, if you already have comprehensive policies and procedures and you need support in bringing that into advanced decisioning, business consulting is a solution for you. 

If you are looking for, again, the opportunity to increase your instant decision because you don’t believe that the policies and procedures themselves would unlock enough, there is most definitely the opportunity to partner with our analytic team. Our analytic team does have the ability to essentially work on your data. 

Looking at your applications, looking at their performance, your existing member performance, and being able to come back to you and provide opportunity for increased, instant decision based on the data itself. That allows for, of course, increased decisioning, the ability to have faster response times, and, again, to capture more business. 

So, for all the reasons that have been shared throughout our discussion so far today as well. And then we do have multiple ways to support the organization. 

We have the means of Reveal Pro, which is more of a FICO-based increase of decision, or we can create and, again, for your organization, a custom score. Custom scores, by nature have the ability to independently increase instant decision at about 25% and, more so than a generic score does. 

So, again, the ability to really meet your organization’s goals in relation to instant decisioning, we are here to partner with you, most definitely, again, with the tools. The incredible advanced decision engine itself provides so much opportunity and flexibility. 

And when moving into that, if you are looking to capitalize on that, again, with who you are today, we have a means to do so. If you are looking for the means to, again, unlock potential that you have not yet entered into, we have analytics as well. 

And we want to make sure that, again, your vision, your goals, and organization is realized with our partnership. And anything that you’ve seen here today, you can most definitely speak to your account executives, and we’ll make sure to help you identify the best path for your journey if this solution is right for you. 

So, with that, I will pass it back to Carrie. 

Key Takeaways and Poll 

Carrie LaRue 

35:13 – 36:03 

Great. Thank you so much, Brie. 

Before we share key takeaways from today’s session, we’ll launch our poll, which will give you the opportunity to request more information. So, at this time, please click the tab, the poll tab located at the top right of your screen to access the pool. 

While you’re doing that, I wanted to let you know that we do have an ebook posted in the e in the doc’s tab, which is called shaping your future for digital success in 2024 and beyond. This document highlights strategies, insights, success stories for thriving and data driven digital world. 

So, again, you can access that and download it right now by going into the docs tab. So, with that, Brandon, I’m going to turn it back over to you. 

Bandon Sisola 

36:03 – 38:28 

Thanks, Carrie. So, tying this all together, into our takeaways before we go to q and a, really what we’re trying to do at MeridianLink MeridianLink is help your future proof your digital experiences. 

So advanced decisioning is a great example of trying to enable you to unlock and improve your automated decisioning rates to provide a great customer experience. We have other things that we’ve introduced in the last couple of months here that also go alongside that. 

For example, MeridianLink Access, those two things tied together can really improve that end to end digital experience overall. So MeridianLink is going to continue to invest in solutions to help you power those up, and we’re here to partner with you. 

So, moving on to the key takeaways here. First off, just looking at the decisioning model, gauge your organization’s appetite for improving your automated decisioning model, and really try to take stock of where you’re at. 

If you don’t know your automated decisioning rates, look that up. But then also take a look at, you know, what quartile you’re in. 

If you’re under 25% automated decisioning today, there’s probably a lot of room for growth within the standard decisioning mod model before you try to deploy, something as complex and sophisticated as advanced decisioning because it can be such a, a large investment in time and getting up and running. If you are interested in advanced decisioning, please do contact your account executive for a demo. 

We’re happy to show you what it looks like and show you into show you the nuts and bolts of how you build it, the rules, rule groups, the decision flows, the custom ratio builder. We’re excited to show all that. 

And then last but certainly not least, and this is going to be a common theme throughout this year as it was in the second half of last year. Make sure you’re planning on moving to the modern experience or already are on the modern experience before you look at advanced decisioning. 

Again, the decision tree model is only for modern. The custom expression builder is only for modern. 

So, you’re going to want to ensure you’re on that so you can take advantage of both advanced decisioning as well as some really exciting things that we have coming this year or things that we’ve launched in the last, like, twelve months or so. So, with that, I’ll pass it over to Brie to show how you can scale. 

Scaling Advanced Decisioning  

Brie Hertel 

38:28 – 39:54 

Thank you so much. So, again, we just wanted to be able to share with you the power of this new solution that we do have experts that are here to help you in that transition. 

It is an exciting and flexible opportunity to be able to realize your organization’s potential, to have your organization’s vision, and, again, how you underwrite be realized in a more flexible manner. And we are happy to, again, pair you with the right solution to help achieve the goals that you have as an organization. 

And in a space like this where it is more comprehensive to maintain, there are more steps and elements to it, you are more than welcome to leverage solutions like our admin pro plus that can stay with you and support you through ongoing maintenance of a platform like this change. Because, again, advanced decisioning, with its power, there is also quite a bit of flexibility. 

There is, again, quite a detailed amount of build that goes into it. And, again, we want to make sure that you’re always successful and always have the right team standing alongside of you on a journey like this. 

So, thank you. And then with that, I’ll pass it over to Mike to share, future proof in relation to business. 

Carrie LaRue 

39:54 – 40:03 

Mike? Oh, you’re on mute. 

Future Proofing Business 

Mike Higgins 

40:03 – 40:07 

Hit twice. Okay. 

How about now? Hit it twice. Let’s see if it works. 

Carrie LaRue 

40:07 – 40:09 

We can hear you. Thank you. 

Bandon Sisola 

40:09 – 40:11 

Okay. 

Mike Higgins 

40:11 – 40:15 

So which place do you want me to speak to? I’m sorry. On that part. 

Carrie LaRue 

40:15 – 40:27 

This is the third panel of, you know, really, how did how did you get going with this and recommendations that you have, for others as they’re trying to future proof their business. 

Mike Higgins 

40:27 – 45:30 

I would just say for us, like, we’re always, like, we’re always asking MeridianLink is there things as soon as we see something that can be tested or it can be piloted or, you know, we feel like it might fit our business need, we look into it. Whether it’s the lending side, the processing side, the sales side, or the like, we look at it across the board. 

And if we think it works, we get together, we talk about it, and we try to be as involved with each other as possible. Virginia Wilson, who, you know, everybody in your team knows is over our processing area. 

Her teams, we sort of work hand in hand trying to add as much as we can and seeing, like, what works, what doesn’t. We’ve kind of felt like prior to us, people did stuff in a vacuum, and things did not click the way that they should. 

So, we’ve made sure that every business unit is involved in these, and that’s what we would recommend. Like, whether it’s we always joke, like, we forget accounting or we forget, you know, loss prevention or someone along the road. 

So, we try to when we start one of these, we include everybody. We kind of let them know, hey. 

If you think you need to be involved more, stay. If you don’t, you know, we’ll add you back as we go. 

And then we really just try to improve the entire member experience. We all have various goals, but we have a service level goal here that everybody has to hit. 

And it all goes back to our membership and, you know, their satisfaction. So, we always feel like if we can improve these various things, that’s going to make that better. 

It also makes our internal teams better. And we’ve also found that we’re not having to add a lot of staff. 

We’ve got a lot of efficiency gains by, you know, changing things in our system that have helped us, you know, through the pandemic. Then after it, you know, some people had to contract, some people didn’t. 

We did not. We’ve added people in a number of departments, in underwriting. 

I didn’t have to make any changes other than adding a few people, which was always good. So, we look at all of that, and then we would say, as you do this stuff, include everybody from your end. 

Make sure you have Breeze team from MeridianLink. They’re the best part. 

And also test. Like, we’ve learned from the time that we first, you know, added you know, we switched over to the modern experience, and now we’ve done we’ve done a couple different modern experience changes. 

We’ve done we’re in the middle of the HELOC one. We’re doing a business one. 

We did this. Just make sure you continue to test and don’t feel like you have to shove it live just because, you know, you want to do it. 

We got to the point even a couple weeks ago, we had a discussion, and we were going to do it on a Monday night. And then people realized that it’s a holiday, so I was like, Tuesday night. 

And then some of my team freaked out because they were like, Tuesdays are the busiest day off of a holiday weekend. But so, we did it later, later in the evening or at night for that. 

We kind of compromised, but no one was worried about it at that point because we felt like we’d done a number of these. We tested it as best as we could. 

We knew there would be some bugs and some things that needed to work out, but overall, it went live. It did what it was supposed to. 

We made some corrections, and we’re still making tweaks to it, but it did not stop our regular business. And that was our other big key. 

We did not want to push it live and then have it affect our business, because as anyone probably knows, if your production, like, makes any little dip or someone can’t do something, everybody in the credit union knows. So, we wanted to make sure that that piece was fine. 

All of our loans kept going through. We were able to make decisions, and we really had no issues with that piece of it. 

We turned it on at night. It was there in the morning. 

Their team was ready to go. As I said, we made a made a little bit of change here and there, but, you know, we we’ve been very, very happy with it and with that process. 

But I think that’s doing these a few times, and we would not do this without admin pro either, like, any of that. All of us you know, there’s a few of us that are admins on the team, and we have a, you know, an admin in house, but we need them for this stuff. 

They’ve you know, they’re really, they’re really good at telling us, hey. We think this will work. 

That probably won’t. And like Bree said, we have a very complicated system. 

It’s part of our own doing, but we’ve added a lot. We have a lot of rules. 

We have, you know, a lot of various little things that maybe aren’t normal to some places, but they work around it. They’ve made it work. 

So those are my biggest things. You know, and as far as the digital stuff, like, I think somebody asked the question, like, do we still do we use Zest now? We do. 

It’s layered on top first. That’s the score that drives it, and then the pricing engine runs off of the regular FICO score. 

We’ve just kind of found we’re trying to layer as many things as we can while improving our business, making it more efficient. We’re trying to cut down on our losses. 

Everybody seemed to know delinquency has started to creep up. So, this was another drive in that to try to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to still help our members but watching the bottom line as well. 

Q&A Session 

Brie Hertel 

45:30 – 45:50 

Thank you. And all those incredible nuances that make your organization special is what, again, really was great to bring forward in this engine. 

So, again, thank you for your partnership and your trust. We are so grateful to be able to, to bring this forward and to see the great success we’ve already had in such a limited amount of time. 

Mike Higgins 

45:50 – 45:54 

I agree. 

Carrie LaRue 

45:54 – 46:30 

Great. Yeah. 

Thanks again, to everybody. And we have had a number of questions, so we do have a little bit of time here. 

Christina would like to know, Mike, how Space Coast, instant decisioning, let me read this right, would like to know how Space Coast is instant decisioning their direct app indirect applications for existing members on the DNA core. How do you know the applicant is an existing member without human intervention? 

Mike Higgins 

46:30 – 46:50 

Typically, when it comes through from either route one or dealer track, it’ll attach it’ll catch it through their social by their member number. And we can see if they when if they by their social, we can click it or it’ll click it automatically, and it’ll let them know through the core that it that they’re a member. 

Brie Hertel 

46:50 – 46:53 

Okay. 

Carrie LaRue 

46:53 – 47:01 

Here is one. What are some challenges that you encountered when rolling out instant denials? 

Mike Higgins 

47:01 – 48:07 

We really didn’t base too much on that. We’ve always done instant denials. 

So, for this, it it didn’t change it a whole lot other than it picked up the system is is much more detailed, so it’s picking up stuff that should be denied where it was referred it before. So, for those, the biggest thing we noticed, like I said, was people were, like, the queues were a little bit emptier, and the instant denial queue, like, bounced up, like, quite a bit the first day. 

I think Amanda, who’s over my consumer area, called me and she’s like, they’re all in there. But she went through and manually checked them because that was part of a I’m not sure if I trust all of this because there were so many at first. 

But it works, and it really is helping us kind of clear out stuff that does not need to be worked or referred. We have rehash queues that our sales team can go through if they want to, but we pretty much let them know we’ve moved to this. 

Everyone needs to trust it. If you see something that’s really egregious or sticks out, you can send it for a rehash, but more than likely your time is better spent, elsewhere. 

Carrie LaRue 

48:07 – 48:24 

Thank you for that. Brandon, this might be to you. 

Is the auto decisioning set up to provide counteroffers? Or I’m not sure if it’s that or it’s specific to Space Coast. 

Bandon Sisola 

48:24 – 48:54 

So, I can chime in in general. We do have the counteroffer capability through indirect channels, and then we also have the ability to do a down sale as part of the automated decisioning setup. 

And in advanced decision, you have the ability with the flows to take them down a different path if they don’t meet the initial requirements of what they were requesting. For specifics as to the implementation of Space Coast, I’ll throw that one over to Brie and Mike. 

Brie Hertel 

48:54 – 50:18 

Yeah. So, and Mike may be able to speak to this from the angle of, of course, managing the underwriting team. 

But I would say that for the most part, it still will not facilitate a traditional counteroffer, if you will. But, again, using the system as designed, in relation to, say, with credit cards and allowing for the system to apply the initial, limit that could be offered and having that detailed in your build can make a substantial difference in, again, whether or not counter offers are necessary. 

Now, of course, with vehicle loans and things of that nature, it does work a little differently because there’s usually more information that’s already at hand. So, it is a true counter when you are not able to give them exactly what they’re asking. 

But there are means to, again, look at how your system is built and really kind of, again, get in front of the opportunities of assigning things like limits on certain types of products and programs so that you are not necessarily always in a counteroffer position. But, no, in a in a sense of the system being able to counteroffer on your behalf in a traditional sense, that is not yet part of the system’s performance decision. 

Like, anything that you would see from, again, even just the impacts of the dance decision where, again, has that helped to be with the decision flow in relation to any counter offers? 

Mike Higgins 

50:18 – 51:11 

Yeah. The counter offers, I’d say, like, to breathe, like, the credit card, it’s a little more helpful because, you know, they might ask for 10, but it’ll put the it’ll set the limit lower, you know, based on their income or the other parameters we put in. 

The autos, we’re a little bit we’re we probably don’t love those as much because sometimes, you know, if it counters it super low, we get pushed back on that. We’ve learned that from we use the, the lenders protection product through Meridian as well, and we used to get counters on those more, but the counters would be $5. 

10, $15,000 lower and the dealer’s like, you know, well, that’s not helpful and why are you sending that? So, we did adjust that, and we do have some counters in there, but we’ve not had a large success rate with it. So, we’d probably have to, you know, mess with it more and maybe test it once that comes along to see if we really want to go that route. 

Carrie LaRue 

51:11 – 51:19 

Perfect. Here’s one. 

Do you still utilize Zest AI with advanced decisioning? 

Mike Higgins 

51:19 – 51:52 

Yes. We use it. 

We’ve been on it for about two years, and we use it for our autos. So, it runs it’s the primary driver for the Zest score that we have it set up for, and then it prices off of the Experian score that we use. 

So, it’s set up as a custom score when it comes across. We don’t use it on personal loans and credit cards now, but we will be using it within probably the next month or two. 

That’s our our next step after this one. We had to get through this project before I started adding more. 

Brie Hertel 

51:52 – 52:33 

Absolutely. And advanced decisioning engines absolutely allows for that layering concept as Mike alluded to, the ability to use different solutions like, again, a s four and have that properly, worked into the flows, which, again, just further enhances the outcomes that we have. 

So that is, again, something we were really grateful to be able to have in some of our first, in a pilot like yourself to be able to make sure and show that, again, any version of enhancement or policy or procedure really does fit well here and can be orchestrated in a flow to serve the organization. 

Bandon Sisola 

52:33 – 53:42 

And, Carrie, I’ll jump in as well because there’s a related question in there regarding a customer deploying Scienaptic and if that conflicts or if that is something that can complement advanced decisioning. In general, Scienaptic is more of a decisioning engine, so it would be more of an alternative to advanced decisioning. 

However, the output from Scienaptic is still a custom score coming back into our platform, and then our platform within consumer selects the product and the pricing based on that custom score that’s returned. So, there’s still a decisioning logic built in. 

It really just comes down to, where do you bifurcate that of which logic do you want to live in Meridian the consumer and which logic do you want to live in Synaptics, but they definitely can be used together. However, I would say just for your sake, for the simplicity of management and administration, you’d want to try to keep most of the logic in a Scienaptic, for example, and then just have MeridianLink consumers select the product and pricing based on what they output. 

Carrie LaRue 

53:42 – 53:57 

Great. Thank you. 

And we have time for one more. Are you promoting this to dealerships, and if so, how? What is your average funding turnaround with instant decisioning? 

Mike Higgins 

53:57 – 54:52 

We are not promoting it to the dealer. We just feel like it’s going to be organic and, you know, for them, our decisioning is is already fairly fast. 

But right now, like, we’re at 99% of our loans, like, get looked at same day, and we are on typically less than forty-eight hour turn times to fund. We’re a pretty large indirect machine. 

Like, we’ve had it going for a while, so, like, we kind of we have it down, and that’s sort of what they expect. So, for us, we didn’t feel like we needed to advertise anything else to them. 

I think our reps are out there telling them, you know, hey. We’ve added something to try to make your instant approvals better and that sort of thing. 

But we’re not getting too detailed with them because, honestly, you know, we all know what they care about. They want to get funded, and they want to get paid. 

And we’re continuing to try to improve that every day. 

Carrie LaRue 

54:52 – 55:20 

Well, thank you for participating in today’s webinar. Special thanks to our presenters, Mike Higgins, Brandon Sisola, Bree Hartel, and our producer, Raven Boykins. 

As a reminder, you will receive an email with a link to the on-demand recording of today’s session. And if you submitted questions during the webinar, you could expect to be contacted directly by your account executive. 

This now concludes our webinar. Thank you for joining.