Business loans: emergency slowdown

The pandemic comes with a decrease in SME loans. How do we rev them up?

This decrease is particularly visible for institutions where the process of granting loans to companies was carried out, fully or partially, in the traditional way, with clients being obliged to turn up in a bank branch.

For financial institutions, banks, leasing companies or factoring companies not prepared to serve customers through remote channels, this is a blocker not only in winning the market and new sales, but also acquiring business opportunities.

It is particularly painful in the case of losing customers from the SME and corporate segments. Customers from these segments are most valuable to financial institutions due to the turnover volume and products margins.

Strong fundamentals

The basis here is to enable full service for any type of customer, including business customers, in the remote mode. But this is not enough. It is also necessary to digitalize and automate processes in order to speed up each application or document verification. It is equally important to maintain a high level of service.

In the case of business customer service, we are dealing with a much more complicated process than in the case of retail customers. In such a process there is way more data that a financial institution must collect, check and process.

Loans to small and medium-sized enterprises and corporations come with a requirement to provide a number of documents which must be verified in many internal and external sources. This is to ensure that the financial institution is able to properly calculate the rating of the entity and determine the terms and conditions of the loan.

High requirements

But the remote service makes the customer expect their cases to be processed automatically without any delay.

To do this, it becomes necessary to entrust as many activities as possible to systems that will be able to carry out remotely not only repetitive activities, but also entire complex processes, limiting the role of humans to supervision and reaction in non-standard cases.

An example of an IT tool that fits into the solution of a problem related to digitization and automation of lending processes is the Comarch Loan Origination system. It provides support for all stages of the credit process: from the customer needs identification, through credit simulations, application submission, applicant verification, agreement signing, to fund disbursement.

Marcin Franczyk - Key Account Manager, Comarch

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Comarch Loan Origination is a platform designed for commercial and cooperative banks and other lending institutions serving business and individual customers.

The platform is based on an original Comarch Business Process Management solution. Thanks to that, all parameters of a credit product, as well as the process of its sale itself, can be strictly adjusted to the customer needs. The solution can also be used to develop and configure all kinds of business processes.

Comarch Loan Origination provides comprehensive service of the credit process and enables independent management of its elements - including user screens, printouts, business parameters or algorithms. And so, it encompasses functions necessary for the efficient sales of credit products to all types of customers.