Enterprise Content Management

The Importance of Loan Automation

In an environment where net interest margin is chipped away with increasing regulatory and compliance burdens and competition increases every day as banks and credit unions pursue the latest and best financial technology to attract new customers, loan management software, and specifically loan automation software, can be a critical factor to your financial institution’s success. Loan origination systems abound, built to solve the issue of accepting applications, gathering information for new loans, and getting them approved and booked into the portfolio. Yet, little effort and substance are provided for managing those same loans throughout the lending lifecycle.

So, why is a loan management system capable of addressing the plethora of loan management tasks that exist in the loan servicing life cycle so important?  For commercial lenders, loan servicing, credit administration, and a host of other lending support staff, the ongoing efforts tied to asset quality management and loan review, exception management, concentrations of credit management, and portfolio management represent a significant use of each employee’s day — and a significant source of both overhead and time not available for new business development. With robust loan automation software specifically developed to automate document workflow, collateral management, credit risk management, exception (tickler) tracking, and reporting, the following management questions move from goals to action items:

• How can we provide more time for lenders to focus on business development and sales efforts?
• How can we reduce our credit risk by maintaining complete loan files and timely loan reviews without ballooning personnel expense?
• How can we satisfy regulators with accurate and detailed management of our concentration of credits with only a basic collateral tracking system?
• How can we improve our efficiency ratio while still maintaining a sound and profitable loan portfolio if we’re constantly adding additional staff to maintain loan servicing functions?

The Best Loan Management Systems Should Solve These Problems

Loan origination software is only the first step in an automated loan management workflow. Look for the following components to get the most bang for your institution’s buck.

• A document workflow system that’s capable of not only archiving documents but recognizing that those documents correspond to outstanding exceptions, appear on management reports, and need to be reviewed by key personnel and then handling each of those tasks automatically, without any employee intervention.
• Integrated credit risk management software that includes:
  • loan review automation, notifying analysts when documents are ready for review and managing the schedule of loan reviews, too
  • concentration of credit management that allows for the classification and tracking of multiple, completely customizable risk points for a single record
  • automated loan-to-value and loan-to-cost analysis
• Integrated loan processing software that can export data from origination to document prep and provides automated loan tracking and quality assurance customized to your institution’s loan policy.
• Loan management dashboards for the entire lending team, from loan officer to loan servicing to credit to the C-suite, containing automated notifications for outstanding work items and a portfolio analysis dashboard providing automated business intelligence

Loan Management Software Built for the Entire Lending Lifecycle

The big take away here should be not to sell your team short when evaluating new systems. Selecting loan origination software that does little to address the significant resources in managing loans throughout the remainder of the loan lifecycle, leaves your bank or credit union high and dry for process improvements that the best loan management systems address because they tackle the complexities of the everyday work of loan servicing, credit administration, loan review, and loan management. Make the commitment to vet and install a total solution and the entire lending team will reap the benefits of more time, allowing them to tackle big goals, not everyday tasks.

Learn More

We can help you identify the components of a robust loan management system. Visit our Solutions by Role to see relevant features that you need to provide for each workgroup in your institution. Here you can view critical features for:

• Lenders and Loan Assistants
• Loan Operations & Underwriting
• Credit Administration
• C-Suite Lending Management

Want a complete work function tool to use when comparing different vendors? Contact us at pfsales@pf-inc.com and we’ll gladly email a copy to you or start with this free guide to help get you started.