How To Streamline, Simplify, and Automate The Loan Process

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Created on Monday, 12 December 2011 10:34

According to a recent survey sponsored by Accenture and SAP, branch employees spend nearly 40 percent of their time working on back-office activities rather than customer-facing pursuits. For many community banks, the loan application process is a key offender. Employees spend time gathering paper copies of documents, and support staff manually affixes them within cardboard files. Other employees file them by hand. Files are retrieved manually when they are needed and are re-filed by hand until they are needed next. There is usually no back-up except for microfilm copies of selected crucial elements. Time lags and redundancies abound.

ECM enables community banks to transform this manual, paper- and time-intensive process into an automated, digital form. With ECM, loan departments design custom, automated workflows to fit their unique needs. Workflows automatically perform specified actions at appropriate times, such as filing newly-created loan applications into appropriate folders, populating template fields and e-mailing documents to identified users for review and approval.

Specifically, ECM can be used to simplify loan processing and underwriting by:

• Electronically routing a customer's loan application file through the origination, closing and funding processes.

• Automatically populating customer or loan index information to reduce manual data entry.

• Tracking missing or expired documents to ensure compliance and reduce risk.

• Retrieving documents pertaining to any relationship based on any one of a number of different indexes, including loan number, CIF number, SSN or EID, document type or collateral description.

• Strengthening loan administration procedures in case of an audit or other examination.

With ECM, staff no longer has to collect, transport and file paper documents before taking action, resulting in improved process speeds for loan applications, fewer lost documents and branch employees with more time to devote to customer service.

"If a customer opens an account at one branch, but ends up doing business at another, all their information will be accessible, no matter where they are. We'll reduce costs by shortening the time it takes to request information from another branch, and it will promote better record-keeping in general."

Henry Walker
Chief Executive Officer
Farmers & Merchants Bank

This has been an excerpt from "Cashing In, On Content Management", a PDF white-paper discussing the strategic benefits of implementing a best-in-class ECM solution:

• Streamline the loan process.
• Automate collaborative business processes.
• Easily integrate with existing systems.
• Reduce the cost of compliance.
• Improve branch management.
• Decrease paper-handling costs.
• Increase space efficiencies.
• Download the white-paper below!