Determining what features to include in your lending origination platform before making an investment decision can be tricky. Because of this, it’s vital to have a well-considered approach in place. This helps ensure borrowers are satisfied, with seamless approvals and a more customer-centric approach to assistance.
Ultimately, your loan origination platform acts as a tool to equip lenders with everything they need to achieve their goals through the automation of each moving part within the origination cycle. Once everything is in place, your originators can easily process and approve loans, while providing higher quality support to borrowers.
We recommend keeping the following features in mind when designing the best lending origination platform for your individual business needs.
1. Ease of use
This is perhaps the most essential element of your lending origination platform. Above all, it should be user-friendly and implementable by your employees. The UX and UI should also be clean, accessible and easy-to-use for borrowers with varying levels of tech literacy.
You can measure how efficient the platform is by analysing how much time is saved. This results in your stakeholders having additional time for more nuanced matters, such as providing assistance to customers and resolving urgent queries.
2. Support automation
Borrowers are always going to raise many questions about approvals, applications documents and more, throughout the entire origination process. It’s quite common for originators to become overwhelmed when dealing with all of the responses in a timely manner, which can severely impact service and support quality.
Fortunately, AI-driven automation equips borrowers with the answers they seek without the time-burden facing loan officers. For example, the implementation of a chatbot feature, or a detailed Q&A section on your website, can easily streamline support and make things easier for stakeholders at each end of the process.
3. Security and confidentiality
Cyber security is increasingly becoming the most pressing of all fintech challenges. According to research conducted by BDO and AusCERT, data breaches have doubled and organisations are becoming overconfident. Because of this, it is vital to consider the importance of maintaining a strict level of security and confidentiality features within your lending origination platform.
The implemented platform you choose should control access between moderated, granted and revoked files. Likewise, the standard AES-256 encryption should be utilised with predictive technologies to ensure current and future threats are dealt with easily and efficiently.
Your customers trust you with their most highly sensitive information, meaning security should be front of mind at all times.
4. API plugins
It’s essential for modern business platforms to cater to the needs of all users. Software solutions can no longer function independently while performing associated tasks in isolation with ease.
API plugins enable you to customise your lending origination platform to make it suitable for lenders and their specific target market. While maintaining a feature-rich platform can be considered a sign of quality, making sure plugins are serviceable to end-users is even more important.
Because most of the processes involved in lending value chains need to be collaborative, you should ensure your platform comes with the most relevant APIs, enabling you to leverage holistic integrations.
5. Future-proof technology
Gone are the days where legacy software or outdated technology is sufficient in meeting business requirements. Technology is more dynamic than ever before, making it essential that your lending origination platform is future-proof.
One of the important elements to consider when selecting features is that changes can and do occur, especially in relation to geopolitical or socio-economic shifts. For example, COVID-19 drastically altered how businesses function and communicate. In the FinTech industry, there was both positive and negative impact. Buy-now-pay-later models, such as AfterPay, seemed to flourish, with sales increasing by 112 per cent from A$5.2 billion to A$11.1 billion, while others struggled to survive the harsh economic climate.
Because of this, it becomes even more vital to select a platform provider who will continue working with you, long after implementation, to help scale the platform and introduce new iterations on an as-need basis.
6. Simplified onboarding
Easy onboarding plays an important role in ensuring your lending origination platform becomes an invaluable tool for borrowers and lenders. If it becomes too complex, loan officers are at risk of spending too much additional time answering questions, rather than focusing on the most important tasks.
By utilising an origination platform with simplified onboarding and an intuitive customer-facing dashboard, customer satisfaction is substantially increased. Likewise for staff onboarding, it can be used as an automated onboarding support function for new hires and operational resources.
Get assistance from 9YC
Are you ready to discover how to build the best lending origination platform for your business? Get in touch with the team at 9YC today to get started.
