LenderHub

In the past ten years, the country has made great strides towards economic recovery, and many millennials who entered the job and housing markets during the downturn have had a chance to pay down their student loan debt and advance in their careers, which means that they finally feel confident about owning a home. In fact, homeownership rates among people in their late 20’s and early 30’s are two to four times higher than any other age group.¹

Collections plays a critical role in your institution’s financial health. While delinquency rates can be cyclical, rising and falling as the economy shifts, for lenders, it’s critical to keep themselves in a position to be able to manage both increases and decreases in delinquency efficiently.

Companies in every industry have had to adapt to growing consumer expectations for financial interactions that are fast, easy, and secure. Experiences with online retail firms like Amazon have conditioned consumers to expect a seamless payment process where debit or credit cards can be used with the click of a button from any device—or even activated through voice commands. That retail experience has evolved into strong bill payment preferences that have influenced how consumers want to manage their loan payments.

Think back to a moment when you’ve left a restaurant, a hotel, maybe a store, and you witness a high-quality customer experience. It could’ve been a small detail or several small details, that when added up provided you, a very different experience. It’s these little experiences more and more retail shops are embracing to stand out from the crowd. The demand for high-quality experiences has spilled over into the financial services market in recent years, thanks to increased competition from traditional and non-traditional financial institutions. Now, more than ever, consumers have a wide range of banking options including loan payment options.

If your financial institution works with a third-party vendor for your collections efforts, you know how important it is to ensure your partners perform at an optimal level. The vetting and on-boarding process alone can take months, so the "set it and forget it" mentality could be detrimental to the overall performance of your collections operation. To ensure your outsourced partner performs at a high level, it’s wise to understand their company procedures and establish agreed upon benchmarks to measure their performance.

An Automated Valuation Model, or more commonly known as an AVM, is a program that automatically analyzes various data points to produce an estimate on the current value of a home or property. An AVM includes:

Being in the payment industry for well over two decades, now, more than ever, we are seeing consumer experience and the demand for self-service solutions causing significant growth in online and mobile payments. Particularly, in the last year, we’ve seen self-service channels are growing at about three times the rate of “agent-led” calls.

SWBC is thrilled to announce the launch of our newly redesigned website! After more than a year of strategic development, an upgraded infrastructure, hard work, teamwork, and commitment, our much improved website went live on April 1, 2018.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a commonly used term for financial services firms around the globe. The phrase—AI—tends to make some people tremble in their shoes as they feel we’ll have an apocalyptic situation on our hands where robots take over the world. Aside from the Steven Hawking and Elon Musk doomsday predictions, AI’s place within the financial services world is meant to pull together multiple technologies to analyze data, foresee solutions, and make decisions.

When a financial institution expands its products and services in one area, the residual effect in other parts of the institution likely requires a reaction. This was the case at USALLIANCE Financial. Their team saw rapid growth as a result of increased indirect lending efforts, which required the team to react to their members' needs. The need to support these new borrowers with an effective loan pay platform became a challenge for USALLIANCE.