LenderHub

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.

When it comes to any area of technology, one thing's for sure: it's ever changing and evolving. Financial technology, or fintech, is no exception. And while it can be tiring to keep up—let alone stay ahead—in the industry, we must do so, since falling behind quickly allows our competitors to gain ground. 

Every now and again, I remember the early days of computing and how important shortcuts were. I might be dating myself, but those early days behind a computer included a lot of DOS commands to search directories and copy, move, and delete files. We would write ‘batch’ files in DOS and save them to perform repetitive tasks. Windows' earliest versions delivered an interface with icons and shortcuts. Then, with the web, we got hyperlinks and bookmarks. Now, we have apps we carry around with us! Times have definitely changed, but the essence of computing is still about efficiency and organization. 

As consumers continue to move toward a completely digital life, they are embracing different forms of online billing and ways to accept payments, including EMV or chip card use, and an increase in mobile connectedness. Customers use an average of 3.6 different payment methods each month for their bills, according to the 2016 Annual Billing Household Survey. Mobile payment use increased dramatically, with 33% of online households reporting to have paid a monthly bill through their mobile phone, a 22% increase compared to last year’s survey.