In today’s competitive lending environment, efficiency plays a very important role to win prospective loans from new and existing members and improve the member’s overall experience. Is your credit union leveraging technology integrations to streamline your workflow process?
The Power Of Integrations
Loan origination system (LOS) integrations help credit unions improve efficiencies and lower operating costs by allowing data and completed products to seamlessly flow back into your LOS for easy storage and access. Through an LOS integration, users can efficiently order settlement services such as valuation products, title/closing products, flood services, verification services, and more.
Interest rates have continued to plunge since late 2018, dipping below 4% in June for a 30-year mortgage, the lowest we’ve seen in about two years, according to Mortgage Reports. This dramatic drop in rates could potentially send consumers scampering to their credit unions to finance a home. From a lender’s perspective, an increase in applications, in turn, increases the need for efficiency.
Error Reduction
Integrations also eliminate duplicate data entry, while significantly reducing the chance for human error by auto-populating data. Having the ability to access the products you need to process your loans through an LOS integration saves your staff an incredible amount of time and minimizes the potential to make mistakes.
Given that borrowers have a number of options when it comes to selecting a mortgage originator, it’s important for credit unions to leverage speed and efficiency to meet the increased demand to close loans faster. According to Fannie Mae, the average time to close on a new home purchase is 46 days, so if your credit union cannot meet or exceed that timeline, you can expect to lose borrowers to lenders that leverage technology and integrations in their origination process. This makes having access to vendors that integrate seamlessly with your LOS so important.
Integration Benefits
There are a number of enhancements that could be available to your credit union, depending on your LOS integration or interface, and these enhancements offer a number of benefits:
- Lower operating cost
LOS integrations can reduce processing and entry time, eliminate duplicate data entry, and reduce data re-keying errors all reducing staff workload. - Data management
LOS integrations can allow data fields to flow back into your LOS. Likewise, integrations can create efficiencies in document management as well by allowing you to load documents directly into your LOS and index them into your imaging system. - Vendor management
Vendor management can be a tedious process for any type of organization. While you likely will never be able to avoid the vendor management process entirely, you can streamline vendor management by selecting a partner that can integrate with your LOS and consolidate your real estate lending workflow and settlement service processes. - Reduce IT Resources
In some cases, LOS integrations do not require IT resources, particularly when your partner has a web-based platform. This is not always the case but given that many IT teams find themselves at resource capacity, it is a great added value!
SWBC Lending Solutions creates efficiencies for your team with the many LOS integrations we offer and improves turnaround times for your credit union by allowing you to customize the services you need. Designed with financial institutions in mind, Lending Solutions allows your real estate lending team to consolidate workflow and conveniently order the multiple products and services necessary to process home loans efficiently. With access to a variety of services, your financial institution will have a seamless real estate processing experience. We can create a valuation workflow that will deliver the most optimal valuation with the best quality, price, and speed that is best for any loan transaction.
To learn more about how your credit union could benefit from incorporating one of our products developed to drive down valuation costs and increase efficiency, click here to download our eBook.
Darlene Burnham is Senior Vice President of Business Development for Lending Solutions at SWBC.
Kristine Kline is Account Executive for Lending Solutions at SWBC.