Digital Lending Resources and Strategy

The Winner's Quickstart Guide to Lending Software

Is your digital lending strategy landing you in the winner's circle?

Digital lending strategy is more important than ever. While many financial institutions have competing priorities, now is the time to give the right-of-way to digital lending and pursue digital transformation throughout your entire lending process.

This quickstart guide to digital lending software will give you the tools you need to develop and implement a comprehensive digital lending strategy that will help you win the race to digital lending maturity.

Creating a digital lending strategy can be an overwhelming task, but Baker Hill can help put you in the driver’s seat. We have more than 35 years experience in helping financial institutions transform their lending business with our award-winning loan origination software. This resource guide will help you better understand what digital lending tools are available and how they can help you develop and implement a digital lending strategy for your financial institution.

Digital lending is no longer the future of banking – it’s today. Reduce friction throughout your lending workflow with modern digital lending solutions.

digital maturity race is on

Want to get a baseline understanding of your existing digital lending strategy? Take our quick digital maturity assessment to gain insight into your loan origination process and receive information on how you can plan and execute a winning digital lending strategy at your financial institution.

The Foundation of Digital Lending

Financial Analysis

A modern digital lending solution for statement spreading is the foundation of building your digital lending process. Generate actionable insights from financial analysis to further develop your digital lending strategy. A holistic financial analysis tool allows you to deliver quick, consistent credit decisions with features like:

  • Automated tax returns and financial statement processing.
  • A dynamic credit memo that is populated with financial spreads and core data.
  • Robust reports are generated to help you make sound credit decisions.

This core component of the Baker Hill NextGen® platform facilitates reporting, data collection, global cash flow, covenants, a comprehensive credit memorandum, and more—all in one central location. 

  • Flexible formats. Baker Hill NextGen® Statement Spreading offers a wide range of formats and features to meet your financial analysis needs for commercial lending. Standard formats and specialized industry formats are built-in. Add covenants quickly and easily using templates without having to leave the application. 
  • Commercial real estate insight. The flexible, dynamic structure of our financial spreading software gives underwriters and credit analysts the reporting options they need to make sound credit decisions. The customized chart of accounts is tailored to the real estate industry and features multiple levels of analysis for various types of borrowers and properties. Group properties based on ownership or other types of underwriting criteria. 
  • Current, accurate comparative data. Baker Hill NextGen®’s statement analysis software offers a reliable source of comparative data. This financial spreading solution provides direct access to the complete database of the latest version of the RMA Annual Statement Studies® based on more than 150,000 financial statements in over 600 unique industries. It also permits the direct and immediate comparison of a subject company to the industry. 

 

 
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Efficiencies Needed within Accounting, Tax Returns & Financial Statement Processing

By leveraging an automated tax return and financial statement processing system, institutions can eliminate the tedious work of inputting financial statement and tax return data into statement spreads, thus ensuring an accurate and consistent approach to analyzing financial risk each and every time.

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Create a strong foundation for your digital lending strategy while improving the quality and consistency of financial analysis with Baker Hill NextGen® Statement Spreading. Download the feature sheet and learn more.

Digitize Your Customer Experience

Online Lending

“Online loan application” can mean different things to different people. For some, the thought of a business owner applying for a loan online seems too complex. For others, it means placing a document online for a customer to print and bring into a branch. However, you know that a true online loan application should integrate into your workflow and support your entire lending process from start to finish.

Today’s clients expect digital services almost everywhere they do business – and the expectations are the same if not greater for their financial institution. If a client isn’t able to conduct business in a way that’s convenient for them, they are more likely to move their banking relationship.

Meet customer expectations by offering small business and consumer loan origination applications digitally with an application branded for your institution. The online loan application and portal from Baker Hill NextGen® creates a fully digital lending experience that can be tailored to your needs, allowing you higher engagement with your borrowers during the loan acquisition process.

western alliance logo

Western Alliance Bank, which prides itself on serving businesses, uses Baker Hill’s loan origination solutions to help manage smaller business loan requests with greater efficiency and ultimately, enable loan officers to spend their time pursuing larger commercial deals.

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Blog Rewind: Meeting the Digital Expectations of Borrowers

Digital lending transformation is still a hot topic among bankers and many institutions have pressed pause on digital transformation projects. The COVID-19 pandemic has put digital back in the spotlight with many community banks and credit unions realizing that they still have room to grow in their digital strategy. While there is always a reason to not pursue digital transformation, there are many more reasons to do so.

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Create the digital lending experience that your customers expect and find even more loan opportunities with the Baker Hill NextGen® Online Loan Application. Download the feature sheet and learn more.

Accomplish More With Collaboration

Workflow Visibility

Commercial and small business loans pass through many hands throughout the lending process, but without the proper digital tools collaboration can be difficult. Understanding where every loan is in the approval process in real time enables your teams to work together more effectively and decision loans more efficiently.

Having one single source for granular visibility into your pipeline provides the data you need to identify bottlenecks in your lending workflow, project loan funding needs and timing, as well as forecast new loan bookings appropriately.

Our commercial loan origination system enables your institution to create the most efficient decisioning process with an optimized credit approval process that leverages workflow automation and business rules. Our single platform simplifies processes and improves efficiency. From start to finish, you can transform and manage the entire commercial lending process for commercial and mid-sized enterprises using Baker Hill’s solutions provide a framework to automate, integrate, and streamline all aspects of commercial lending.

With the right loan origination software, your bank can accomplish more together without the added cost of hiring and training employees.

Workflow Visibility

  • Keep everyone in the loop. A cloud-based loan origination system will support a collaborative lending workflow across multiple devices, where even remote employees like commercial relationship officers that are onsite with customers can help push loan requests through.
  • Increase employee bandwidth. Such a system will also give employees time to focus on tasks that positively impact your financial institution’s bottom line and serve customers better, whether with the computers on their desktop or with the supercomputers in their pockets. 
 
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Creating Collaboration in Commercial Lending

What parts of your process have a single point of failure that will either slow down the lending process and make you lose that pending deal, place risk in the financial performance of the deal, or not even give insight into the potential opportunity? Collaboration can streamline, optimize, and enhance the digital lending process.

baker hill whitepaper are banks and credit unions making the most of technology optimized

When it comes to implementing technology into the branches, many choose to try and piece meal different products and systems together. While you might think you’re saving money by only buying certain products from certain vendors, you’re most likely losing key integrations that come from having a single solution.

Bring Together People and Processes

Pipeline Management

How do your lenders prospect for new business? How do you collect information on new prospects? What types of interactions are your employees having with prospects and clients? Being able to answer these questions is critical to effectively managing your lending pipeline and growing your business but bringing together the people and the process can be difficult.

A Client Relationship Management solution that is not just integrated but embedded in your loan origination software allows you to more effectively track and manage interactions. Since the relationships and the processes are managed in one place, this enables you to create accurate pipeline reports and grow your business while attracting and retaining your most valuable prospects and clientele.

Baker Hill NextGen® CRM integrates data into one simple tool to enhance the client experience and provide actionable insights. 

  • Gain and retain business. Focus on the sales management stage of the relational cycle, addressing the need to attract and retain valuable clients. Each line of business, calling officer, and service team member will achieve individual performance targets. Our bank and loan origination CRM facilitates communication across the institution regarding client activity, goals, and opportunities. 
  • Maximize client relationships. Capture and manage pertinent client and prospect information, including contacts, call activity and touch history, products and collateral, sales opportunities, client classification and segmentation, relationship groups, client-specific relationship plans, referrals, and correspondence groups. 
  • Turn strong relationship management into healthy ROI. Baker Hill NextGen® CRM supports each stage of the relationship management process. It provides a quick-view interface with client value and risk; shares call activity management to any relationship manager; prioritizes opportunities by probability of close, stage, and anticipated close date; tracks sales opportunities types, amounts, and fees; and actively helps your team manage and improve the number and quality of referrals. 
 
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CRM Systems Are Critical for Understanding Your Customers

With an effective CRM, a financial institution can better gain and retain business, but it must also focus on the sales management stage of the relationship cycle, addressing the need to attract and retain valuable clientele.

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Gain and retain business with digital lending tools while transforming the way you bring people and processes together with the Baker Hill NextGen® CRM. Download the feature sheet and learn more.

Exceed Customer Expectations

Customer Contact

As technology is evolving, so are consumer expectations – especially when it comes to transparency and communication. Keeping up with the expectations of your clients not only builds trust and loyalty, but allows you to more efficiently deliver on business objectives.

High engagement during the loan application creates high customer satisfaction. Leverage the power of a secure client portal to engage with, collaborate with, and update your customers so that they feel like a business partner with your institution, not just another number.

The Baker Hill NextGen® Client Portal is a solution that is accessible to both you and your customers so you can meet their desire for a convenient and simple communication process. 

  • Make lending a two-way street. Seamlessly integrates with the Baker Hill NextGen® loan origination process platforms, creating the most efficient loan application in the industry. Dynamic technology with responsive design maximizes digital outreach to customers. 
  • Loan status transparency. With Baker Hill NextGen® Client Portal, your customers can track their application from submission to loan closing. This transparency will help remove the stress your customers often feel during the loan application process.  
  • Provide secure access to all relevant parties. Portal users can authorize collaboration amongst their key business partners, such as accountants, attorneys, and more.  
 
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Use digital tools to create transparency in communication and improve engagement with your customers during the lending process and streamline the flow of data with the Baker Hill NextGen® Client Portal. Download the feature sheet and learn more.

digital maturity find out where you stand

Choosing the right loan origination system is an important decision. This additional resource guide will help you identify the right loan origination software to:

  • Provide a cohesive strategy for your loan origination process
  • Handle compliance and functionality requirements
  • Increase efficiency, manage costs, and meet regulatory challenges
  • Help you prepare for the changing loan marketplace and be ready to capitalize on opportunities for new loan business
why institutions choose baker hill

Check out this webinar recording that features a panel of banking leaders from across the country discussing trends in digital lending transformation and how it has impacted their institution:

Additional Digital Lending Resources

Ready to learn more about loan origination systems and how they can help you develop and execute a winning digital strategy? Our Loan Origination Systems Basics resource guide is designed to help you better understand the basic features of loan origination systems as well as the benefits of implementing loan origination software for your financial institution.

Baker Hill is in the business of evolving loan origination by combining expertise in technology with expertise in banking. Baker Hill NextGen® is built on decades of walking alongside banks and credit unions as they provide vital resources to their communities. A configurable, single platform SaaS solution for commercial, small business, consumer loan origination and risk management that grows along with you as your business needs change, Baker Hill is lending evolved.

 

Learn how to Choose the Right Loan Origination System

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“170% increase in loan production”

Marquette Bank cites tangible, transformative outcomes.