At their core, commercial lenders are relationship managers. Their focus is to successfully attract and acquire qualified customers, create relationship transparency with new and existing customers, and manage their organization’s credit exposure while reducing the decision-making time on commercial loans.
With so much at stake, it’s important to identify some of the biggest issues that keep commercial lenders up at night. First and foremost, commercial lenders’ success — as well as their organizations’ success — is determined by the following four things.
Consumer expectations
Customers demand a frictionless user experience, and many banks are feeling the pressure because they are not delivering the experience that customers want, especially in regards to digital account opening, onboarding, and loan origination. In a world of same-day shipping and real-time data, it takes banks too long to get their customers what they want when they want it.
Controlling costs
Banks spend almost 70% of their IT budget on maintenance. In order to control IT costs, community and regional banks will be forced to consider mergers and acquisitions options because they feel they will not be able to compete with the large FIs on spending. According to the American Bankers Association, the average checking account costs a financial institution $250–$400 per year. Automating the deposit account opening process can keep costs down and increase customer satisfaction.
Outsmarting the competition
Banks can increase efficiency by removing duplicate data entry, eliminating long processing times, enabling self-service capabilities, and building customer trust — all by increasing transparency and collaboration. Banks can easily automate manual processes and offer customers personalized solutions based on their spending habits and life events.
Additionally, the increasing popularity of fintech companies is disrupting the way banks do business. Traditional banks have historically been unable to adjust to these changes in technology, operations, and culture.
Maintaining compliance
Banks spend a large part of their budget on being compliant, and on building systems and processes to keep up with escalating requirements. To effectively manage regulations and overall compliance, banks need to centralize client data to track changes and SLAs through detailed reporting and dashboards.
By digitizing the loan process, enabling visibility into the full customer relationship, and uncovering cross-sell opportunities, commercial lenders can concentrate on what matters most to the overall organization — customer acquisition and growth.
Solutions for commercial lenders from Silverline
The right technology solution can help, and determining the right implementation partner for that solution is a critical part of the process. If you’re a commercial lender facing too many angst-ridden, sleepless nights, see what Silverline’s banking and lending solutions can do for you.