While an important reason for the acquisition of a commercial loan system is the need for better risk management analytics, the impact on productivity should not be overlooked.
With commercial lending, many hands will touch a loan from origination through closing and on to portfolio administration and risk management. In many cases, each set of hands looks at a loan from its own perspective associated with its business function. The information that each set of users wants to see about a loan will be different and the work or analysis that they perform will differ.
Consequently it is not uncommon for each set of hands to rekey information about the loan into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet or Access database. Each time the same information is rekeyed, efficiency is lost.
And when one set of users wants to see information that has been assembled by another user or group of users, the information is requested often by email or a voice mail, with hours or days lost as one person finds time to pass on information to another person. Time lost further reduces efficiency.
The ability to provide effective reporting is diminished when little information resides in a central database so the time is devoted to pulling together information from many sources to support reporting requirements and portfolio risk management analysis.
Operating with information in a central, shared database can have a significant positive impact on productivity. Information can be accessed more quickly, reports prepared more efficiently, and risk management analysis performed that could not have been performed if data were scattered throughout the organization. Productivity can be further improved by metrics that display the time required to complete each step in the lending process and productivity measures such volume per person.