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Before The Gap was an international clothing brand, it was a small record store in San Francisco’s Lakeside district.

Similarly, tech giants LG got their start selling cosmetics, toothpaste and other personal hygiene products.

That’s right.

LG was originally the Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Company.

There are dozens of stories like these. Businesses grow and evolve over time. And while you might never pivot as dramatically as The Gap or LG, your products and services have and will continue to evolve to meet new market demands.

It goes without saying, but if you shift your offering, expand into new markets, or even grow, your current software may no longer meet your needs. And while it can be tempting to try and adapt existing technology to meet current business requirements, it’s often like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. When assessing the long-term feasibility of your existing loan application processing solution ask the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of maintaining the current system?
2. How much will it cost to make significant changes to meet new business needs?
3. How long does it take to make changes?
4. Is it making you less competitive?
5. Do you rely on the vendor to make key updates?

Over time, keeping your software operating smoothly will cost much more than investing in new technology.

Don’t believe it?

Consider this. Outdated technology cost businesses $1.8 trillion in wasted productivity in 2016.

Is your software making you more, or less, competitive?

Can your current solution:

• Be adapted to new business processes?
• Support a growing number of users?
• Automate repetitive tasks?
• Handle operations on a bigger scale?
• Power a first-class consumer experience?
• Enable business users to make changes quickly?
• Make integration to data sources and other tech solutions easy?

Your credit application processing solution should power not impede business growth and help make you more competitive. If you’re constantly fighting the system to make changes, waiting on integrations due to complex coding, or sacrificing the consumer experience because the system can’t support instant approvals, then it’s time to make a change. Why? Because, if you can’t make changes quickly your business is exposed to increased risk and missed opportunities.

Consumers demand instant decisions and the best user experience. For today’s tech savvy customer making them wait more than a few seconds for a loan decision is like expecting them to go back to the days of dialup internet. While it used to be fine to wait a minute for the internet connection to kick then another minute for a website to respond, it’s now considered slow if a website isn’t visible in just a couple of seconds. If you continue to use the ‘dialup’ of loan application solutions, expect your customers to have found an alternative option before the modem even starts to warble!

Telltale signs your credit/loan application processing system is past its sell-by date include:

• You rely on your dev team to make simple changes
• Making sure it works properly is becoming increasingly expensive
• Waiting on changes is slowing down business growth
• It can’t scale to meet your business needs
• It’s preventing you from making real-time decisions
• Tie-dyed t-shirts, leisure suits, and mullets were acceptable fashion choices when you first started using the software

What should you look for in a replacement?

The benefits of replacing a legacy system far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of implementing a new loan application processing system, but how do you know which replacement solution to select?

Here are five key things to look for in a replacement:

1. A low-code solution – Low-code solutions allow you to configure, maintain and even create new processes without having to rely on your dev team. Instead, you can drag and drop different components to make changes quickly and easily. The right low-code solution can reduce or eliminate the delays caused when business teams have to rely on over-burdened dev teams or the solution vendor to make updates.
2. Simplified integration capabilities – Integration, whether it’s to internal or external sources, is a challenge for many businesses but it shouldn’t be. Your credit application processing solution should make integration easy, so when new integrations are needed, which they will be, the reliance on dev involvement will be minimal and business users can take the lead.
3. Advanced automation options – Process automation is a vital component to powering business growth and ensuring a first-class customer experience. Your new solution should make it easy to automate processes and also enable you to reuse automation components across multiple business processes.
4. Scalability – You would never invest in a one bed property if you knew you’d need something bigger in a few weeks. So, why treat a processing solution any differently? If you’re investing the time and money in changing solutions you should choose one that you can keep for many years, which means picking one that is able to scale as your business grows!
5. Flexibility – It’s impossible to predict what changes your business will need to adapt to in the future, so your credit application processing solution needs to be flexible enough to allow your business to remain agile. For example, Provenir’s simple drag and drop interface, allows you to build new tools easily when you need them, allowing the business to respond to changing markets and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise.

Wrapping Up

Saying goodbye is never easy. But when you find a credit application processing system that configures to your needs with minimal coding, integrates at lightning speed, and that actually makes your life simpler, you won’t regret making the change.

After all, the (first) end of Michael Jordan’s basketball career brought a triumphant return, a record-breaking winning season, three championships (and how dare we forget about Space Jam). And, the end of Genesis, as the world knew it, brought Phil Collins’ solo career. What would the world be without that rendition of True Colors?

Endings are just the opportunity for something new. It’s time to take the leap!

What is a decision engine and how does it help your business processes?

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Dear Lender,

It’s that time of year when we make plans, we think about ways we want to give more, and make resolutions to change. So, I thought it would be a good time to talk about how we could improve our relationship…

This isn’t a break up letter dear Lender, this is me reaching out to try and make our relationship keep working for many years to come—because when your service works well we’re great together. There’s just a few glitches in the system that we need to work through!

Did you know that it took almost 280 pages of paper to get my mortgage with you?

That’s right, two hundred and eighty. How did that happen? I get that you need copies of my bank statements, information about my earnings, and a billion other pieces of information. But there’s got to be a better way, don’t we live in a digital world?

On its own 280 might not seem like a whole lot of paper to buy a home, but I’m just one person. In 2017 the US used over 2.2 billion sheets of paper to process mortgage applications. That means as a country we had 204,000 trees chopped down so we could print out digital documents.

In the long-run I think switching to digital files would be good for both of us, think of all the time your team could save if they didn’t have to print out hundreds of documents a day! Not to mention the reduced stress of not having to fix printer paper jams and reprint the pages that came out pink because you’ve ignored the ‘low ink’ warning for too long. And storing all of those paper files? Well, that’s just a fire hazard.

I understand that there’s regulations that you need to comply with and data security to worry about, but other lenders are able to solve these problems, can’t you too? I really want this to work between us, we’ve been together since I opened my first account and I honestly don’t want to move on, but I’d really like it if we didn’t need to contribute to deforestation the next time I buy a home. Could this be one of your New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps something to put on your Christmas list? I’m sure your CRO would approve.

While I’m here there’s a couple of other changes that could really help our relationship…

Like quick access to funds in emergencies.

It would make life so much easier if loans were credited to my account on the same day that I applied for them. The loan I needed to cover a car repair earlier this year took almost 72 hours to hit my account. I know that for you 72 hours doesn’t seem like a long time, but for me it meant that I had to pay for a Lyft for 3 days to get to and from work.

What made this more frustrating is that other lenders offered same day approval, but I’ve been banking with you forever, so I trusted you to provide a fair loan. Honestly, I was pretty tempted to try one of those mysterious fintechs I’ve heard about. Apparently they make an instant decision. I really wish you’d do this so I didn’t have to worry about when I’d be able to pay for unexpected emergencies. Do you think faster loans are something you could provide in the future? Perhaps it could all be completed online so I didn’t have to come down to the branch. I’m sure with the right technology your talented risk team could make this work!

This last request is really advice to help you get along with my friends better, after all, their opinion matters a great deal to me, especially when they say bad things about you. Those bad reviews can make it a little tempting to move on…

It would be really awesome if when they communicated with you that you saw them as more than a number.

While I get that traditional credit scores are a simple way of assessing applications, behind every application is a human who’s more than a number. After all, not everyone has been in the country long enough to build a credit history that bureaus pay attention to. And my immigrant friends aren’t the only ones who have struggled to build a traditional credit score. My friends that only use cash have also found it hard as their thin credit files make them difficult to understand. I’m sure there’s data that could tell you more about our lives than a traditional credit score does. Maybe you could look at more than our credit scores to dig deeper into our lives. With bank statements you could really understand how careful we are with money and other alternative data could tell you about our lifestyle.

So, instead of seeing a 550, you could see a recent immigrant with two kids who just secured a high paying job. Or a single mother working three jobs who consistently pays her bills on time but needs extra cash to pay for Christmas gifts. Is there a way you could see my friends as more than a number? How do other lenders do it? I’d love for you to see the bigger picture so my friends can take advantage of your great products too!

Sincerely,

(Redacted)

AKA Credit score: 610