Commercial Lending Best Practices: Managing the Document Lifecycle

Hello, and thank you all for joining us today. My name is Naomi Nicholas. I'm the senior marketing manager here at Allogene. In today's session, we'll be going over commercial lending best practices and how AccuAccount can help streamline document management and exception tracking across the life of the loan. Joining us today is Jen Mitchell, our director of product management for AccuAccount. If any questions come up during the webinar, please feel free to type them into the chat box, and we'll answer them at the end or follow-up after the session. With that, I'm gonna hand things off to Jen. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us today for this webinar. So first, I'm gonna start with who is Allegiant. We are a company who offers an end to end banking solution. We are purpose built for financial institutions. That's all we do is is work with financial institutions. Allegiant has continued investment in our offerings to offer a feature rich road map. We work very **** ** that. Allegiant has over 200 plus employees and over 25 strategic partnerships today. So a little bit about our solutions. We actually have two types of solutions available to financial institutions. We have payment solutions, which is our unified product. And then we have an enterprise content management suite, which includes fast docs, AccuAccount, and our Allergen document portal. We are really going to focus on just AccuAccount today. You'll see a little bit and hear a little bit about our document portal as well. But the main focus of AccuAccount was that it was built to help financial institutions manage commercial loans with imaging and integrated exception management. Allogene supports about 500 financial institutions across The US, Canada, and The UK. Our customers range from community banks and credit unions to some of the largest financial institutions in the market. We work with organizations of all sizes, proving that our solutions can scale and adapt to diverse operational requirements. We are now going to review the challenges and impacts we have heard from financial institutions in commercial lending. These challenges are not specific to a financial institution size or location. So let's review where the document management breakdowns happen and talk about each one a little bit more in-depth. Again, one of the biggest ones is document management. Financial institution employees spend a lot of time and effort looking for information that is often difficult to locate. When you have employees looking for multiple loans a day, this time adds up very quickly. The next challenge is document collection. Document collection is a big pain point for financial institutions. Lenders request borrowers to bring paper documents into the branch or offices or even out in the field picking up documents from borrowers. We hear that a lot. These requests are often initiated via email or yours... They're still making a lot of phone calls to try and get this information. The next challenge, exceptions and covenant management. Exception tracking is frequently done very manual still today. Some financial institutions have multiple spreadsheets from... For each of their loan admins, for each of their credit admins, and then even some have all of those spread across multiple branches. The next section, I'm gonna combine these two together, the cross collateral complexity and the borrower relationships. Visibility is often fragmented across systems. Customer relationships are typically managed by some type of customer number from your core. Customers end up having multiple customer numbers for each relationship. Cross collaterals are typically very difficult for customers to manage documentation and especially tracking. We have seen some systems where financial institutions are tracking for the same collateral multiple times because it's been crossed multiple times. And then the last one is gonna be our audit and exam readiness. Finding documents for audits is difficult, and it is very time consuming for staff and examiners. Looking through paper files, sometimes in multiple locations and multiple shared file locations to make up a full file is a difficult and frustrating task. Now we are actually going to put up a poll so you can share which one is your biggest challenges today. I'll give you about forty five seconds to get those answered, so I'll give you just a second here. Alright. Maybe just a few more seconds here. I appreciate all of you submitting your answers to us. Alright. Alright. We're gonna go ahead and close out that poll. Thank you for your submissions. I do appreciate that feedback. Looks like just based off of the information I see here, the largest challenges are pretty much across all of these, but it does look like document collection has won the the biggest challenge for you guys today. We're gonna actually look and review each challenge and some of the best practices that we offer in our Accu account product and document portal product to ever... Overcome these breakdowns. So the first challenge that we talked about was the document management. You know, today, information is scattered across multiple systems, folders, and paper files. The foundation of an effective lending operation is centralizing the document management. Every relationship, loan, and collateral records should have a consistent structure. Staff should know exactly where documents belong, where they are, and where they can find them. Standardization improves efficiency, consistency, and audit readiness. And the goal is reducing time spent searching for information and increasing confidence in the file com... Completeness. So now we're gonna look at a few slides in AccuAccount and how we help with document management. AccuAccount enables financial institutions to create custom document structures for each credit file using data from the core. These credit files become the master credit file for this borrower. Each loan in a customer's portfolio is set up in AccuAccount with the documents required for its loan type based on those core codes as well. These document structures are built and customized for your institution during the implementation. You get to see exactly what you want for each of your loan type. Collateral records are also imported from the core with their document requirements, types, and descriptions enable... Enabling accurate tracking and reporting for for you. This allows your lenders to see what documents are complete and in the file and which files are missing. It also helps them identify which collateral needs the missing information because you have that collateral description from a reporting standpoint. AccuAccount lets financial institutions tailor document requirements to a specific borrower, loan, or collateral type. We have something called hidden groups. So in this example here, the SBA group, it makes it easy to apply specialized document requirements when needed. This customization allows financial institutions to build out the requirements needed for your creative financing. Finance... Financial institutions can use AccuAccount document schedules to define requirements specific to each loan agreement. In the example on the screen, the borrower's covenant requires quarterly financial statements, which AccuAccount automatically schedules and tracks for you. Now we're gonna move on to document collection. Again, the largest problem that... And blocker that you all have today is this document collection. So borrower documents are collected through email, shared drives, and other unsecured or in... Or inconsistent method. Email and paper are still the most common methods for collecting documents today in financial institutions. Unfortunately, it creates security risks and makes tracking really, really difficult. Borrowers expect a secure and convenient experience from their financial institution. Financial institutions should establish a standardized intake process. This improves both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Now we're gonna look a little bit at our document collection, which is called our Allogene's document portal. Allogene's document portal lets users request documents easily from AccuAccount. From AccuAccount, users can request specific borrower, loan, or collateral documents. The request is then emailed to the borrower, or you can email it to a CPA or attorney requesting a single document or multiple documents in one email. Allogene's document portal enables secure collaboration between financial institutions and borrowers, allowing staff to exchange notes without relying on back and forth emails or phone calls. When customers receive an email request, this is this is actually going to be your public portal. They can securely sign in to that public portal. The portal consolidates multiple requests in one place, making it easy for your borrowers to upload documents directly to you. The next challenge we had was exceptions and covenant management. Tracking exceptions, covenants, and policy requirements in spreadsheets creates manual work and limits visibility. Manual exception tracking is one of the most time consuming act... In commercial lending. Many institutions still track exceptions through spreadsheets or individual calendars. Best practice is to automate monitoring and reporting. Lenders should be able to quickly identify missing, expired, and upcoming requirements. Proactive tracking reduces risk and improves compliance. So now we're gonna look at exception tracking within AccuAccount. So exception management should be a continuous process. It's not something that you just do the first day you get the information and you never have to look at it again. Missing documentation should be easy to identify. Missing documents are identified with the red dot directly on the customer page. Expiring and expired items should trigger awareness be... Before becoming a problem. Within AccuAccount, the customer page will identify expiring and expired documents with an expiration date next to that specific document. If it is expiring, it's in a gray color just to notify you it's going to expire. And if it's in red, that means it has expired, so you need to get this taken care of immediately. Accio account has an exception tab on each of the customer's pages. This exception tab will identify all types of exceptions for this customer. There's also an exception tab for the loan and each collateral. AccuAccount helps financial institutions manage a broad range of exceptions beyond just your document missing and expired docs. It also includes policy, task, and covenant exceptions. One of the biggest pieces of exceptions in covenant management is obviously reporting and notice generation. Reports and notifications help lenders proactively address the issues. Standard and dynamic reports give credit and loan admin... Loan officers, management, and executives the exception in portfolio data they need. Notices are generated directly out of AccuAccount to the borrower or a specific contact. So there you... There's your CPA, attorney. Maybe you have a a... For a business account, you have another contact. And they... You can easily request those documents needed to complete the file. The goal is to reduce manual follow-up and improve portfolio visibility. The next challenge is our cross collateral management. Managing cross collateral relationships... I'm sorry. Managing collateral relationships across multiple loans can create duplicate efforts. Many borrowers have relationships that span multiple loans and collateral records. Very common. Without a consolidated approach, institutions duplicate effort and lose visibility. Best practice is maintaining one collateral relationship across all associated loans. This helps reduce administrative overhead and improves risk awareness. Now looking at how we can help you manage cross collaterals with an AccuAccount. By creating a cross collateral relationship in AccuAccount, it enables shared documents and visibility across all collateral pledged by a borrower. Documents are shared and collateral exceptions are managed only once. Reporting will be easy to manage, showing only one missing or expired document for the exception over all of those... That collateral that's being used. Cross collateral relationships identify every relationship that shares pledged collateral, improving visibility and reporting. This visibility allows a full view of what loans a collateral is pledged to. Alright. Our next challenge that kinda goes hand in hand with those cross collaterals is the borrowing... Borrower relationships. The lack of visibility into the full borrower relationship throughout the bank or financial institution. Risk cannot be managed effectively if information is fragmented. Lenders need a complete view of borrowers, guarantors, related entities, loans, and collaterals. Relationship centric management improves decision making. It also helps lenders identify risk, opportunities, and operational efficiency more quickly. So looking at AccuAccount, it uses imported core data to provide a complete view of each borrower relationship, making it easy to navigate between borrowers. This relationship is built one time for each customer. That customer's master credit file will be used for any credit, loan, or collateral that this customer is associated with to bring that complete three sixty view. The customer page displays all borrower loans, balances, and statuses providing a complete view of the relationship. With one customer page per borrower, this helps lenders and underwriters identify the complete relationship of that specific borrower. Creating related entities reveals shared credit relationships and the balances and commitments used to assess lending limits. Related entities will also identify borrowers that do not have a current relationship with the financial institution. So when a credit is added into AccuAccount, you can build those additional customers that don't currently have a relationship with you into AccuAccount manually and tie them to the other credit relationships so you can use that information for future lending. This is the customer summary. This customer summary actually gives AccuAccount users a complete view of each borrower relationship, including loans, deposits, collateral, notes, and comments. This summary allows financial institution users to see the complete relationship in one place for additional opportunities or conversations with your borrowers. And our last challenge that we brought up was audit and exam readiness. Preparing for audits requires significant time spent locating and validating documentation. Audits should not require weeks of preparation. Institutions should maintain documentation in a way that supports ongoing readiness. Examiners increasingly expect fast access to complete information. Digital audit preparation significantly reduces staff effort and disruption. The best approach is preparing continuously for an audit rather than scrambling right before an audit. AccuAccount converts customer and loan lists into a digital audit, giving examiners direct access to the information they need without pulling paper files or searching through multiple electronic repositories for credit and loan documents. So best practices in action. When the... These best practices are implemented together, the impact can be significant. Institutions report time savings through automated reporting and exception management. Audit preparation time can be dramatically reduced. Staff will spend less time searching for documents and more time serving customers. Better processes lead to better compliance, lower risk, and improved borrower experiences. So some of the next steps that we could take with with any of our attendees today... First of all, we are a team of former bankers, so we are very well rehearsed in what these challenges are, and we can help with those challenges. Conversations through implementation, even all the way to our support team, we have this expertise. So next steps for you, you know, we could always schedule a demo. We customize that demo to your needs. We'll have a little call and discuss what your what your challenges are, and we'll make sure that when we do this demo, it is it is specific to your bank or credit union. We can always give you some references. We've we've implemented several banks, and we have several good references who use our product today. One of the best things that we do is is we actually push out trial sites, and those trial sites kinda give you try before you buy. We have a a hands on guide for you to go through and step through the product. It's it's your demo site, so you have the ability to do whatever you would like with it, add exceptions, remove exceptions, whatever you would like to do with that. Alright. Now I'm gonna hand it back over to Naomi. I thank you all for listening to me go through those steps today. Thanks, Jen. We'll move on to our q and a portion. If you have any questions, now is the time to drop them in the chat. We got a couple earlier, so we'll start with one from earlier. Does your system just manage commercial loans, or can we use the system for all loan types? Oh, that's a great question. You can absolutely use AccuAccount for any loan type. I have banks who use it for all their consumer, mortgage, commercial loans, SBA loans, whatever whatever type of loan that comes over from the core, we can import it, and you can use it for that type. Great. Thank you. The next question we've got is how do you get the images into the system to track exceptions? So images are actually brought in a lot of different ways. Obviously, paper files, we have a way to scan those in. We have a product called Accu Image. We also can do something with a multifunction device scanner and barcodes. They'll also be pushed into AccuAccount. We can utilize the doc... The document portal. The document portal, once you approve documents through there, they automatically go into AccuAccount and right into the document tab. And then we can always do a conversion. So if you're currently imaging into something, you're using another product today, we can take those images and we can import them in during implementation and convert those directly in. So you're starting with a brand new system, but you have all of your existing documents. We also offer integrations with LOS, any esign products, so a lot of different ways to get documents into our product. Very good question. Thank you for asking that. Awesome. Thank you, Jen. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for questions today. If you submitted one and we didn't get to it, we'll follow-up afterwards. And if any additional questions come to mind, please reach out to marketing@alligent.com or visit our website. And before we go, be sure to check out our events page for all future webinars if you enjoyed this one. We have one coming up on Alligent document portal on November 2 that you won't want to miss. We appreciate your time with us this afternoon, and we hope you all have a great day. Thank you, everybody. Have a great day. Thanks.