Lending
09/13/2019

Embracing Frictionless Loans by Eliminating Touch Points


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.

WRITTEN BY

Kevin Polinsky