Today’s financial lending landscape is experiencing a dramatic shift – a wave of change that was catalyzed by the pandemic and is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. The modern lending consumers of today expect to interact with their lenders and other financial institutions in new ways, anywhere and anytime.

Banks across the US and around the world are making changes to their physical branch strategy as face-to-face customer traffic has fallen drastically. This puts increased pressure on industry players, with self-service options and interaction via customer care centers coming to the forefront. With more customers reaching out through mobile apps, using chat features and looking for an omnichannel digital experience, the pace at which customer expectations have changed has accelerated dramatically over the last two years.

What lies ahead?

In 2022, the first and most prominent lending technology trend we see is an increase in end-to-end digitization as more customers are looking for digital-first platforms. Financial services organizations should look to leverage automation to facilitate faster credit approval, quicker loan servicing, straight-through processing and self-service options such as advanced chat bots to create truly digital lending processes. Banks should continue to focus on end-to-end digitization and facilitating an omnichannel experience for their customers.

We will also see widespread use of digital lending software like unified dashboards, intelligence and analytics, digital customer profiles, online applications and increasingly collaborative business models with more partnerships between lenders and fintech organizations. Aside from the critical pressure of adapting to modern customer expectations, other defining pressures include the need to continue to enhance the customer experience, manage increasing staff attrition rates, reduce total ownership costs and stay ahead of the complex and ever-changing regulatory environment.

The ongoing road to compliance

Fair lending laws and regulators deepening the scope of their assessment of banking activities equates to an increasing need to adhere to the rules set forth. Financial institutions need to ensure they prevent any compliance issues and are in line with lending regulations. As the trend towards automation continues to grow, alignment with regulator requirements becomes increasingly important. While greatly improving efficiency, the automation of a non-compliant task significantly increases the risk of systemic harm to the broader customer base.

A partner with industry and domain expertise is essential to success

In addition to the challenge of thriving in a fierce regulatory landscape, legacy systems and the slow response times that can come with them create further bottlenecks to harnessing digitization in the lending space. These difficulties highlight the importance of partnering with an experienced automation/digitization partner – one who has deep, proven experience dealing with the lending regulatory landscape and can cut through bottlenecks to help reduce cost, improve efficiency and create the digital, omnichannel experience that customers want.

When it comes to lending automation in banking business process management (BPM), there are typically two areas to consider. The first is workflow and identifying which tasks are ideal for automation.

FIS will automate tasks and activities using API calls, utilize workflow to trigger bots and effectively manage inventories of customer demand. Additional aspects of automation are operational efficiency and the opportunity for the reduction of human error. Automating higher risk tasks (such as initial BSA Alert reviews and AML analysis) and removing the human element (and with it, the possibility of manual error) can greatly improve an organization’s risk mitigation practices and engenders compliance improvement with lending regulations. And given the stakes involved, it is imperative to have the right automation and intelligence built in as automating a non-compliant process could cause more trouble – and faster.

How FIS can help

FIS has depth and breadth of experience as a partner in the digital lending space. We have a horizontal line of sight, not just into any single organization or industry, but to hundreds of different clients and several verticals worldwide. This gives us early insight into a variety of banking lending-specific trends, and by extension, solutions. This means we are front and center when it comes to spotting lending technology trends, early warning signs, changing customer expectations – and having the answers on how to meet those expectations. FIS provides insight into the industry that financial institutions would otherwise have to pay for in the form of industry reports or consultants.

As a trusted partner in the BPM space, FIS brings domain expertise, size and scale and process customization to meet the unique needs of our clients. We help our clients enhance control framework and reduce total cost of ownership. The benefit is the ability to scale at a competitive position and to create unique, engaging customer experiences, which in turn provides competitive differentiation.

How FIS partners with our clients

FIS leverages a consultative, advisory approach to lending BPM for our client partners. We bring more to the table than just adhering to SLAs – we provide insights that our clients would not otherwise be privy to, allowing them to see the market from a broader lens, keeping them one step ahead of their competitors. Many banking products have been commoditized today; financial institutions must create a unique client experience to stay fresh and thrive in the modern lending market.

The following steps are at the core of our transformational approach to BPM:

Step 1. Understand the client’s specific requirements and current practices. This allows us to create a baseline and more effectively design the transformative future state operating model. After understanding the organization’s current model, we consider their challenges, strategic objectives and how they are positioning themselves in the marketplace. Only when the challenges faced by the client are well understood, can we work towards successful mitigation and ultimately creating the foundation for transforming the business.

Step 2. Transition to an FIS partnership model smoothly and with minimal business disruption. Once we have stabilized current processes and built our collective knowledge pool, we can begin a comprehensive process review.

Step 3. Introduce best practice processes, methodologies and frameworks to facilitate improvement.

Step 4. Optimize processes and applying automation. We leverage digital channels and technologies to create an optimal business model with reduced total cost of ownership through increased efficiency.

Using a multi-pronged, transformational approach to BPM ensures that our clients stay ahead of the competition by delivering a differentiated, modern customer experience. FIS BPM services enable our clients to achieve their automation goals using the latest technology while remaining compliant and seeing excellent return on our investment.

FIS is your complete Banking BPM partner.