Loan Review Best Practices: Key to Combating Credit Risk

Despite current benign credit metrics, there’s a growing industry-wide sentiment that credit stress looms ahead.

There’s a proven correlation between early detection of emerging credit risk and reduced losses. Effective and efficient loan reviews can help your institution better understand the portfolio and identify potential risk exposures. Now is the time for banks to ensure their loan review, either in-house or external, can proactively identify potential credit weaknesses, gain deep knowledge about the subsegments of the portfolio, learn where the vulnerabilities exist and act to mitigate risk at the earliest opportunity. It’s time to emulate a whole new set of loan review best practices:

1. Trust your reviews to professionals with deep credit experience – not just junior CPAs.
Your reviewers should be seasoned experts that are skilled in the qualitative and quantitative axioms of credit, with hands-on experience in lending and risk management. Because their experience will drive better reviews and deliverables, it’s a good idea to ask for biographies of people assigned to your institution.

2. Confirm your review includes paralegal professionals to conduct separate documentation reviews.
It is essential that your loan reviews include specialists with technical expertise in regulatory and legal compliance, lending policy adherence, policies, collateral conveyances, servicing rules, among others – working in tandem with seasoned credit professionals.

3. Insist on smart, informed sampling.
To uncover vulnerabilities in specific segments of the portfolio, rely on a selection process that helps you choose very informed samples indicating possible emerging risk.

4. Quantify both pre- and cleared documentation, credit and policy exceptions.
In the best of times, many loan reviews show almost no bottom-line degradation in loan quality for the portfolio as a whole. On close examination, you may find significant numbers of technical and credit exceptions indicating that the quality of your lending process itself may need to be tweaked.

5. Understand your own bank’s DNA.
In this complex economic environment, it is imperative for institutions to analyze their own idiosyncratic loan data. Arm your loan review team with the ability to automatically drill down into the portfolio and easily examine trends and borrower types to inform risk gradings, assess industry and concentration risk, along with other variables. Seasoned reviewers will be incredibly valuable in this area.

6. Observe pricing based on risk grades, collateral valuations and loan vintages.
Loans originating around the same time and credits that tend to migrate as a group tend to share common risk characteristics. Isolating and analyzing those credits can answer the important question, “Are you being paid for the risk you’re taking?”

7. Pair loan reviews with companion stress testing.
Regulators are encouraging stress tests as a way for banks to learn where their risk may be embedded. Companioning the tests with loan reviews is a productive way to gain this knowledge. Start at the portfolio level and do loan-level tests where indicated.

8. Transparently report and clear exceptions in real time.
Banks can benefit from using fintech’s efficiency to remove huge amounts of time, team meetings and staff intrusions from the traditional process of reviewing loans. An online loan review solution gives teams a way to see exception activities and clearances as they happen.

9. Comply with workout plan requirements prescribed by interagency regulators.
Banks typically design workout plans to rehabilitate a troubled credit or to maximize the collected repayment. Regulators now require institutions to examine these plans independently as a standard loan review procedure that reflects a healthy degree of objectivity.

10. Deliver comprehensive management reports and appropriate high-level board reports with public/peer data.
Management should receive prompt and thorough loan review reports; board members should receive high-level reports with appropriate, but less detailed, information. Public data or analyses of your institution’s performance as compared to peers should accompany this reporting.

11. Conduct loan reviews as a highly collaborative and consultative exercise – counter to “just another audit.”
An effective loan review is not an internal audit experience. It’s an advisory process, and this approach is extremely important to its ultimate success. Substantive dialogue among participants with differences of opinion is key to favorable outcomes for the institution.

12. Take advantage of a technology platform to automate every possible aspect of the loan review process.
Best practices call for the efficiency that comes with automating the loan review process to the maximum extent possible, without sacrificing substance or quality. Technology enables faster and more complete early detection of vulnerabilities.

Loan reviews are critical to an institution’s risk-management strategy. It’s a one-two punch: Deeply qualified reviewers combined with automated technology that delivers a more efficient, less intrusive loan review process that will help combat the looming credit stress ahead.