It may look like the golden age of “instant.” The casual iPhone user can get an Egg McMuffin delivered to their door while it’s still steam-hot in the bag. The average Twitter user can use their ampersand key to swat through a brand’s customer service obstacles like Arnold Schwarzenegger cutting through the jungle in Predator. It may look like we’re in the golden age of immediate-results technology, but we’ve only just reached the earliest, primordial stages in its existence, and consumers have already and instantly adjusted to the instant age.
As the world of apps grows, consumers have, and will, expect every corner of our daily lives, especially the institutions that manage our financial loans or our medical information, to be as cloud-efficient and scalable as the app that schedules an undergrad to walk your dog while you’re in a meeting. Technology tends to evolve inwardly and sensitively, finding it’s way into our banks and homes–not broadly and impersonally. Notwithstanding, loan origination systems are a deeply personal technology.
As a microcosm-example, a 2016 piece in Forbes summarized that brands who engage in direct customer service via Twitter see a 19% increase in customer satisfaction. Loan origination is one of life’s sensitive areas–vulnerable like our medical information or mortgage payments–that needs to adapt to this instant-evolution.
Picture the expectations of instant response when we have an artificially intelligent platform accessible from a contact lens. How long do you think a customer will tolerate waiting for approval or a green “success” check or a loan when all of the technology around us has already reached the speed and accessibility only dreamed up in Ray Kurzweil novels?
Waiting, whether for your breakfast sandwich or your loan decision, is as a dead and dusty a concept as your CD-RWs. Instant technology that learns for the individual and can execute in real time is the present and future. We’re already expecting banking to happen in the blink of an eye. In the future–especially in light of the cascading failures in recent financial technology–it will need to happen even faster, more efficiently, and securely.
