A cloud-based lending platform is the heart of your online deal syndication service. It impacts every area of your business from investor servicing to loan servicing. It’s the primary way that your investors interact with your firm to access new opportunities and allocate their funds. It also scales the amount of loan administration your team can do, opening up growth possibilities for the business.
A Look at the Factors Driving the Value of Lending Software for Private Lending Firms
The platform you choose will have a long-term impact on investor satisfaction rates. Selecting the wrong technology partner can be detrimental to your success. Custom development projects have a notoriously low success rate so the idea within financial organizations of “build versus buy” is increasingly “buy” but selecting the right vendor is paramount to success.
Here are some important considerations for selecting and implementing new lending software including:
- What are the expenditures and ROI of lending software?
- How does lending software implementation affect current operations?
- What drives user training and adoption?
- How to select solutions that will support you as you grow?
- What are the signs of a good implementation partner?
Understanding Software Expenditures and ROI
ROI is one of the most important factors for selecting new lending software. The best lending platforms offset costs by creating new revenue streams. You can do this by:
- helping you increase the number of accounts booked,
- streamlining the entire loan application and servicing process,
- automating submissions and reviews,
- reducing operational costs by doing away with paper documents,
- replacing physical customer visits,
- motivating investors with personalized insights.
Carefully analyze these processes in your company to find opportunities to increase ROI. The financial impact of high-quality lending software is immediate and significant.
Katipult's software-as-a-service model offers our customers the adaptability needed for business specific processes or nuances. The delivery of the product happens very quickly so a large part of your business processes become digitized immediately. There are no big upfront commitments or big upfront one-time fees. Additionally, service cancellation is customer-friendly and hassle-free.
How an Implementation Affects Your Business
Business disruption during a software implementation needs to be planned so the effects are minimal. Lending firms need a partner with a proven methodology and relevant industry experience. This is where partnering with lending software specialists can make a huge difference for ensuring the intended outcome.
Change management is a crucial component of making the jump to a new digital solution. Software implementation is straightforward and quick in most cases but getting buy-in from team members can be difficult if there is resistance to change. Managing user expectations and changing old habits needs to be handled with a proven and proactive strategy.
To help you with this, Katipult relies on an agile implementation methodology. It ensures a quick transition with prioritized phases. We’re also highly experienced in getting users accustomed to digital tools.
Katipult designs solutions with intuitive user experiences in mind. There are no steep learning curves and training is as seamless as possible.
A More Intuitive User Experience Leads to Easier Training
Next-generation lending software should be easily navigable and familiar. The ideal lending platform should need as little training as possible.
Katipult's solution is intuitive for both lending companies and their customers. On the investors’ side of the software, users very rarely need any training at all. The software provides guided workflows that are very straightforward to follow and understand, and lead to higher investment dollars and investment frequency.
Katipult offers a proprietary training system to help customers become more advanced users of the software. This includes educating administrators on exactly what the solution can and can't do. You'll learn how to set up loan documents, manage compliance, and accelerate syndication, among other key tasks.
Solution Adaptability: The Importance of Scaling and Innovating
As your business grows, having stable and high performing software infrastructure is a must. The best lending software platforms must be able to scale up and down in a controllable manner to manage user activity levels. Otherwise, companies run the risk of not being able to support the investor base, which can cause investor frustration and severely impact your bottom line.
The growth drivers of your business must be supported by your software of choice. An end-to-end, integrated solution is the best option for your organization. Relying on different types of disparate systems will lead to scalability-related issues, and integration requirements will create higher ongoing operational and maintenance costs.
Finding a Fitting Implementation Partner
You should always look for the most knowledgeable and industry-focused technology partner. This takes time, careful planning, and research. Always go for partners that view the financial industry as their target market. If it seems like lending software is not part of their core business, you should look for someone else.
Lending firms also need a software partner that is innovative and always evolving to keep up with new market trends. Look for press releases on vendors’ websites announcing upgrades and feature expansions. Browse sources for industry awards or other notable milestones in the vendors’ history as a proven track record is crucial.
It’s also important not to select a partner based solely on advertising messages and sales demonstrations. Customer references and detailed testimonials can help you find the best fit by leveraging the experiences of firms with similar characteristics.
Conclusion
A significant number of lending firms rely on legacy systems and the industry is evolving to be more modern, innovative, and cloud-based. Legacy systems only partially cover the functionality set necessary for loan servicing as these systems are usually for internal use and as such aren’t investor-oriented.
Legacy solutions are primarily used to manage loan books through back-office processes. This means investors can't even access their loan portfolio to view their earnings. Most legacy tools come as desktop-installed software, which can cause major limitations when it comes to mobility and user experience on phones or tablets.
Katipult wants to help lending companies move away from difficult-to-use lending tools. We want to ensure our customers have a seamless, intuitive experience. Our industry expertise has helped us create an end-to-end platform for lending firms, and we offer many customized workflows to ensure we can provide the correct experience for your firm.
If you’re interested in finding a new lending software solution, we're here to help. Click here to get in touch with our team of experts.
