A Lending Platform Prepared for Pandemic Pitfalls

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Managing a loan portfolio requires meticulous review, careful documentation and multiple levels of signoff.

That can often mean tedious duplication and other labor-intensive tasks that tie up credit administration staffers. So, when Michael Bucher, chief credit officer at Lawton, Oklahoma-based Liberty National Bank, came across a demonstration of Teslar Software’s portfolio management system, he couldn’t believe it. The system effortlessly combined the most labor-intensive and duplicative processes of loan management, stored documents, tracked exceptions and generated reports that allowed loan and credit officers to chart trends across borrowers. The $738 million bank signed a contract at the end of 2019 and began implementation in February 2020.

That was fortuitous timing.

Teslar Software’s partnership with institutions like Liberty National, along with its efforts to assist banks and borrowers with applications for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, earned it the top spot in the lending category in Bank Director’s 2021 Best of FinXTech Awards. Finalists included Numerated — a business loan platform that was another outperformer during the PPP rollout — and SavvyMoney, which helps banks and credit unions offer pre-qualified loans through their digital channels. You can read more about Bank Director’s awards methodology and judging panel here.

Prior to implementing Teslar Software, Liberty National used a standalone platform to track every time a loan didn’t meet the bank’s requirements. It was an adequate way to keep track of loan exceptions when the bank was smaller, but it left him wondering if it would serve the bank’s needs as it continued to grow. The old platform didn’t communicate with the bank’s Fiserv Premier core, which meant that when the bank booked a new loan, a staffer would need to manually input that information into the system. The bank employed one person full-time to keep the loan tracking system up-to-date, reconcile it with the core and upload any newly cleared exceptions on various loans.

Bucher says it was immediately apparent that Teslar Software offered efficiency gains. Its system can integrate with several major cores and is refreshed daily. It collects documentation that different areas within the bank, like commercial loan officers and credit administration staff, can access, allows the bank to set loan exceptions, clears them and finalizes the documentation so it can be imaged and stored in the correct location. Staffers that devoted an entire day to cumbersome reconciliation tasks now spend a few hours reviewing documentation.

Bucher was also impressed by the fintech’s approach to implementation and post-launch partnership. The bank is close enough to Teslar Software’s headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, that founder and CEO Joe Ehrhardt participated in the bank’s implementation kickoff. Teslar Software’s team is comprised of former bankers who leveraged that familiarity in designing the user’s experience. Between February and June of 2020, the earliest months of the coronavirus pandemic, Teslar Software built the loan performance reports that Liberty National needed, and made sure the core and platform communicated correctly. Weekly calls ensured that implementation was on track and the reports populated the correct data.

Teslar Software’s platform went live at Liberty National in June — missing the bulk of the bank’s first-round PPP loan issuance. But Teslar Software partnered with Jill Castilla, CEO of Citizens Bank of Edmond, and tech entrepreneur and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to power a separate website called PPP.bank, a free, secure resource for multiple banks to serve PPP borrowers.

“Teslar Software came to the rescue when they provided their Paycheck Protection Program application tool to all community banks during a period of extreme uncertainty for small businesses due to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Castilla says in a statement to Bank Director. “The partnership we forged with them and Mark Cuban was a game changer for so many that were in distress.”

And Liberty National was able to use Teslar Software’s platform to create and process forgiveness applications for the 500 first-round PPP loans it made. Bucher says the forgiveness application platform is similar to the tax preparation software TurboTax — it breaks the complex application down into digestible sections and prompts borrowers to submit required documents to a secure portal. The bank needs only one employee to review these applications.

“We had such a good experience with the forgiveness side that for PPP in 2021, we partnered with them to handle the front end and the back end of PPP [application],” he says. “It’s now all centralized within Teslar so that when we move on to forgiveness, everything is going to be there. I’m expecting the next round of forgiveness to go a lot smoother than the previous round.”

Outside of PPP, Teslar Software has allowed Liberty National’s credit administration team to manage its current workload, even as staffing decreased from 10 people to six. Instead of taking a full day to review and verify loan exceptions, it takes only a few hours. Bucher says the bank is exploring an expanded relationship with the fintech to add additional workflow modules that would reduce duplication and eliminate the use of email to share documents.

Embracing Frictionless Loans by Eliminating Touch Points

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lending-9-13-19.pngTo create a meaningful customer relationship, banks should drive to simplify and streamline the operational process to book a loan.

Automated touchpoints are a natural component of the 21st century customer experience. When properly implemented, technology can create a touch-free, self-service model that simplifies the effort required by both customer and bank to complete transactions. One area ripe for technological innovation is the lending process. Banks should consider how they can remove touch points from these operations as a way to better both customer service and resource allocation.

Frictionless loans can move from origination to fulfillment without requiring human intervention, which can help build or enhance relationships with clients. Your institution may already be working on decreasing touches and increasing automation. But as you long as your bank has an area of tactile, not strategic, contact between your staff and your customer, your bank — and customers — will still have friction.

Bankers looking to decrease this friction and make lending a smooth and seamless process for borrowers and originators alike should ask themselves these four questions:

How many human touchpoints does your bank still have in play to originate and fulfill a loan? Many banks allow customers to start a loan application online and manage their payments in the cloud, but what kind of tactile processes persist between that initial application and the payment? Executives should identify how many steps in their lending process require trained staff to help your customers complete that gap. Knowing where those touchpoints are means your digital strategy can address them.

What value can your bank achieve by reducing and ultimately eliminating the number of touches needed to originate a loan? Every touch has the potential to slow a loan through the application process and potentially introduce human error into the flow. But not all touchpoints are created equal.

Bankers should consider the value of digital data collection, or automating credit score and loan criteria review. They may be able to eliminate the manual review of applications, titles and appraisals, among other things. They could also automate compliant document creation and selection. Banks should assess if their technology enablement efforts produce a faster, simpler customer experience, and what areas they can identify for improvement.

Do you have the right technology in place to reduce those touchpoints? Executives should determine if their bank’s origination systems have the capabilities to support the digital strategy and provide the ideal customer experience. Does the bank’s current solution deliver an integrated data workflow, or is it a collection of separate tools that depend on the manual re-entry of data to push loans through the pipeline?

Does your bank have an organizational culture that supports change management? Does your bank typically plan for change, or does it wait to react after change becomes inevitable? Executives should identify what needs to happen today so they can capitalize quickly on opportunity and minimize disruptions to operations.

Siloed functional areas are prone to operational entrenchment, and well-intentioned staff can inadvertently slow or disrupt change adoption. These factors can be difficult to change, but bankers can moderate their influences by cultivating horizontal communication channels that thread organizational disciplines together, support transparency and allow two-way knowledge exchanges.

For banks, a human touch can be one of the most valuable assets. It can help build long lasting and meaningful relationships with clients and enable mutual success over time. This is precisely why banks should reserve it for business activities that have the greatest potential to add value to a client’s experience. Technology can free your bank’s staff from high-risk, low-return tasks that are done more efficiently through automation while increasing their opportunities to interact with customers, understand their challenges and cross-sell products.

Frictionless loan planning should intersect cleanly with your bank’s overall digital strategy. It could also be an opportunity for your bank to scale up planning efforts, to encompass a wider set of business objectives. In either case, the work you do today to identify and eliminate touch points will establish the foundation necessary to extend your bank’s digital reach and offer a competitive customer experience.

Leveraging Fintechs to Do More with Less

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Fintech is often viewed as a disrupter to the banking industry, but it greatest influence may be as a collaborator.

Financial technology companies, often called fintechs, can provide benefits both banks and themselves, especially when it comes to lending. But banks need to be prepared for the potential challenges that can arise when forming and executing these partnerships.

Partnerships between community banks and fintechs makes sense. For community banks, the cost of building or buying their own online loan origination platform can be prohibitive. A partnership with a fintech can help banks achieve more with less risk.

Banks can partner with fintechs to improve services at a significantly lower capital expenditure, reducing the cost of doing business and reaching market segments that would otherwise not meet their credit criteria. Collectively, these relationships advance not only the business of community banks, but also their mission.

Partnering with banks offers fintech firms brand exposure, allows them to more quickly scale their business and increases their access to capital and liquidity, which can translate to better company returns.

Community banks and fintech firms should be natural allies, given the market dynamics and growth in online lending, the underfunding of small businesses and the increased competition facing smaller institutions.

Community banks are also ideal first movers in the bank-fintech partnership space, given the personal nature of the business, low cost of capital and ability to move quicker than regional banks. Community banks are the preferred source of funding for small- and medium-sized enterprises, and consistently receive high marks from clients for customer service and overall experience.

However, there can be challenges. Bank respondents cited their firms’ overall preparedness as a point of concern when considering a fintech collaboration, according to a recent paper on bank-fintech partnerships from law and professional services firm Manatt. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau mandate that banks must implement appropriate oversight and risk management processes for third-party relationships and service providers.

Other issues that could arise for community banks when pursuing a fintech partnership include data security, staff training and technology integration with legacy systems. It’s imperative that community banks are clear about the responsibilities, requirements and protections that will contribute toward a successful partnership in conversations with a fintech firm.

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Despite their desire to fund local businesses, community banks sometimes encounter significant pressures that prevent them from doing so. These issues are amplified by various market forces and longstanding structural inefficiencies such as consolidation, slower economic expansion, increased regulation and more-stringent credit requirements. Consumer expectations around new channels and banking services compound the situation. Community banks need to adapt to this new dynamic and complex ecosystem. Without a strategy that includes technological vision, banks risk becoming irrelevant to the communities they serve.

Fintech firms — reputed as industry disruptors — can be powerful collaborators and allies in this land grab. They can help banks expand their borrower market by reaching customers with alternative credit profiles and providing technology-driven improvements that enhance the customer experience. The inherent advantages held by community banks make them well positioned to not only capitalize on these opportunities, but to lead the next wave of fintech innovation.

How Pinnacle Improved the Efficiency of Construction Loan Management

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partnership-6-27-18.pngWhen banks make a construction loan on a new office building or housing development, the funds usually are not provided to the borrower in a lump sum, but instead are dispersed as various project milestones are achieved. The administration of these credits are often handled on a simple spreadsheet—one for every loan. That might work for a small community bank that only makes a handful of construction loans a year, but not for Pinnacle Financial Partners, a $23 billion asset regional bank headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee that considers construction lending to be an important business it wants to scale in the future.

Pinnacle wanted a more efficient way of administering its construction loan portfolio, particularly after a series of acquisitions of other banks that also did construction lending. “We’re always looking for ways to improve efficiency,” says Pinnacle Senior Vice President Dale Floyd. “Coming out of the recession, we were growing fairly fast, had merged a couple of banks into us and everyone was doing construction lending differently. We needed some consistency throughout the organization, and to try to be more efficient at the same time.”

And that led Pinnacle to another Nashville-based company, Built Technologies, which has developed an automated construction lending platform that not only centralizes the administrative process, but promises to be an effective risk management tool as well. “Construction loans require coordination between the bank, the borrower, the contractor, the title company and third-party inspectors to review the progress of the project,” says Built CEO Chase Gilbert. Now all of these parties are connected in real time and everyone is looking at the same information instead of information silos, and the draw process can be managed more proactively. “We bring that process online to the benefit of everyone involved.”

Pinnacle and Built were co-finalists in Bank Director’s 2018 Best of FinXTech Startup Innovation award.

The benefits to Pinnacle begin with greater speed and efficiency. “It cuts down on phone calls and emails and paper,” says Floyd. “It reduces the chances for errors … because the [loan] doesn’t have to go through so many hands.” When banks are using simple spreadsheets to administer their construction loans and a builder wants to make a draw against their loan, an inspector will have to drive to the project site and assess whether the required work has been completed, drive back and write up a report authorizing a dispersal. With the Built platform, all this happens much faster. “[All the information] is there and it’s immediate,” says Floyd.

The platform also provides the bank with an enhanced risk management capability. “We do a lot of large loans,” Floyd explains. “I can pull a report at any time of every loan I have over $1 million, by location and by builder. I can track loans that have been fully funded, or I can track loans that we’ve closed but no disbursements have been made for three months. If we see that we want to know why. What has caused this project to stall?”

And when state and federal examiners come into the bank, Floyd can “pull up any loan that they want to see and look at the inspection reports, look at the pictures and see all the numbers,” he says. “That information is there for as long as we want to store it.”

Gilbert says Built spent nine months getting to know Pinnacle and understanding the bank’s goals for construction lending before work commenced on the project. “Pinnacle is a high growth bank and it was looking for something that would allow it to scale [that business],” he says. “The bank is also fanatical about customer experience and it wanted to find a way of giving its borrowers and builders a best-in-class experience.”

Floyd says Built also made some changes to the platform at the bank’s request—for example, building in a feature allowing a borrower to overdraw their loan with the bank’s approval if the situation warrants it. “They’re constantly looking for input,” he says. “They want to make the system better all the time.” And the new platform was easy to implement, according to Floyd. “That’s one of the things I was surprised about,” he says. “The training time is very short, and it’s very user friendly.”