The Digital Lending Landscape is Rapidly Changing – Here’s How to Adjust

Innovation is easy for no one. But staying in the comfort zone of outdated interfaces and technologies isn’t an option. With new players entering the lending arena and technology becoming more advanced and accessible, the speed of innovation has to grow as well.

The good news is that going digital for a lender got much easier. And the business value of this shift is more than real. Total digitally disbursed costs over the next 5 years are expected to be over $1 trillion. And a big part of that money is going to be someone’s interest rate. That is why in this article, we’ve decided to outline some of the things we’ve seen lenders struggle with most often and some of the mistakes that can and should be avoided.

 

Meaningful innovation instead of buzzwords

Pretty much every part of the lending process can be automated now. From origination and servicing to collection and reporting. And things like artificial intelligence and machine learning aren’t just subjects of science fiction anymore. These are real technologies that already help lenders approve, process and service more of the right loans faster and safer. It may sound as if it takes huge investments to make those things happen for your lending operation. But in reality, this tech can easily be deployed with TurnKey Lender out of the box. Even with a free trial.

Many companies in the financial sphere fall flat with their digitalization because they are led by the buzzwords instead of real innovation that benefits their business. With all the aggressive marketing and media coverage, it may be easy to start believing that no matter what, you have no choice but implement things like blockchain in your operation. When in reality you need not the most hyped tech, but the one to address your pain points best.

Even though each lending operation may have unique needs and problems, there are technologies that have proven to bring the most value to lending businesses worldwide when going digital. And TurnKey Lender puts those technologies to use in order to deliver the most advanced, versatile, and easy-to-use lending solutions on the market.

No one knows your business and what it needs better than you. But meaningful innovation is certainly something to seriously consider, especially since the competitors, new and current won’t stay idle.

LaaS over custom solutions for lending

The route of automating a lending operation through custom solutions has too many drawbacks when compared to an advanced SaaS like TurnKey Lender. To name a few:

• Immense expenses (business analysis, development, testing, security, design).
• Years of full deployment delay.
• Desperate catch-up game with the market leaders and big banks.

These are just some of the biggest problems a lending business will encounter should they go for a custom solution. And keep in mind that even when the solution is in place, it requires to constantly be updated and maintained which inevitably adds to the operational costs and costs of products/services. Now let’s look at what you get with TurnKey Lender:

• All the functionality to automate the whole lending process is ready out of the box.
• You can start working on a free trial and pay as you go.
• Platform quickly deploys from the cloud and powers your business with the most advanced and innovative software there is.

Of course, not all lending software does that. That’s exactly why TurnKey Lender wins so many awards and is recognized by lenders and FinTech specialists all over the world.

 

Simplify onboarding

I know there’s a reason for a complex onboarding process. With all the money involved in the business, it makes perfect sense to pay exceptional attention to the users you accept as clients. Especially since the regulators don’t let up and governing bodies make continuous efforts to control the lending niche. Between those two factors, making onboarding easier sounds like a really tough task.

The answer once again is automation. And not just any automation, but machine learning that will learn about your users and approve more of the right loans faster and more accurately than humans ever did.

Borrowers expect to get their money quickly. And you do have to provide them with it or they will find a different lender. The good thing is that AI has already been implemented in the TurnKey Lender’s tool suite and it makes it possible to onboard a new client within minutes where it used to take days.

 

Improve UX and UI

Each year design standards change and new trends arise. It’s not to say that your whole online presence should necessarily go through a full redesign each year. On the contrary, working on design, consider making improvements continually. Small usability changes which are rolled out more often trump a single major redesign due to the fact that you can instantly see the reactions of your users and adjust accordingly.

At TurnKey Lender, we don’t tolerate it when any of the competing products have better usability, customization capacity, and overall design than our tools. We constantly work on more intuitive flows and better interfaces. So you can let us take care of that side of things for you too. This way all that’s left to you is the design of your website where you present your services and products.

Use your data to make better and faster decisions

To comply with KYC and AML, you will need to collect some personal information about your users. All this data may sit idle in your databases or it can be used to teach machine learning algorithms. If taught properly, the machine already can make faster and more accurate credit decisions for you, evaluate risks and take care of the origination and onboarding much faster.

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Automate everything you can

I can’t stress this enough: to some degree, anything in lending can already be automated. And each small automation, if done right, saves you some money and reduces space for errors. Just to give you a taste of what’s possible, the things TurnKey Lender automates out of the box are loan origination, underwriting, collateral management, debt collection, loan servicing, reporting, supervision, and regulatory compliance.

Our automation is smart, easily integrated, and cuts operating costs drastically. Of course, humans will be involved on each of those stages for control and analysis, but overall, lender’s life becomes a lot easier.

 

Gather top talent

This is one of the few points in this guide that don’t touch on technology directly. In the day and age when progressive lenders go fully digital, there’s no doubt that the sole most important thing for a business is the team behind it. And we know that it works because we live by those words ourselves. TurnKey Lender has been meticulously gathering the best specialists around the globe since the very founding of the company and it’s our staff that made it possible to create the worlds most advanced and at the same time affordable platform for lenders.

Partnerships for capability gaps

Users strive for all-in-one solutions in each niche, to get all of their needs covered by a single provider. And lending operations aren’t an exception. So if you can’t cover some elements of your business yourself, consider partnering with companies that can help you. This way everybody wins – your users get a more wholesome experience, your partners get access to your audience and your business grows due to the added value of versatility.

And once again, at TurnKey Lender we practice what we preach so it’s easy to draw examples. To name a few, our company partners with Thompson Reuters to make sure regulatory compliance is a bliss for our clients and with HP to take our cloud computing to the next level. And for many, this becomes the ultimate selling point of our product.

Leave space for personalization and human face

But with all the automation, don’t forget that the users need to feel special and taken care of personally. So make sure it’s easy to contact a real person on your site and stay open to client’s feedback and comments. Because if you manage to build real human relations with the clients, it will be much harder for them to switch a service provider.

Since the majority of lending work will be automated, try to allocate more resources to stay in touch with more people. And not only with the customers but with all the prospects who may have questions about your products or are just researching. This is mainly achieved through proactive support. But you can also consider having a blog written with a real human voice and genuinely aimed at educating users and at helping them.

Explore the underserved regions and demographics

Lending technology for entrepreneurs gets more accessible and the cost of user acquisition in developed countries grows due to the competition. Businesses can continue to fight over the same turfs but there are still 2.4 billion people in the world who don’t have access to quality financial products. And the majority of these people do need those products. That’s why it’s well worth looking into underbanked regions (in your country or worldwide) and underserved demographics for whom it’s hard to work with large institutions.

Cross-platform support

In developed countries, users expect to be able to use your products and services anywhere and anytime. From their phones, tablets, and desktops, day and night. And if your system functions flawlessly on all the major devices, browsers, and platforms, you get a major advantage compared to the outdated providers who still live in the previous decade. And this doesn’t only apply to your lending platform, it’s also true for your website which should look and feel good to users, new and existing.

Final thoughts

The lending market is focused on the borrowers now. Low interest rates, better customer support, quick approvals, and intuitive interfaces. All of this leads to increased competition among lenders. And to adjust to this rapidly changing landscape, one needs to keep all of the above in mind.

The good thing is that with TurnKey Lender, the vast majority of these pain points is addressed by the most advanced and intelligent software there is. In addition to that, the easily deployed platform doesn’t have a steep learning curve and you can start using it for free, paying for the services as you go.

If you’re still on the fence about using TurnKey Lender, do sign up for a free trial. Our team will be happy to show you exactly how we can take your business to the next level.