Chris Little, managing director of BEP Systems, gives an overview of how new, customisable cloud based mortgage and loan systems can benefit proactive lenders and give them a competitive edge
In an ever more competitive lending market, the aim of lenders is to be agile when seeking to gain a competitive advantage and in many cases this comes down to the core systems they are using to run their business.
This can include quickly launching new products to steal a march on competitors, push more services to introducers and customers in order streamline efficiencies and to keep up to date with new regulations in various aspects of their lending model.
There are several options in order to meet strategic business goals for the technology running their business, a complete rewrite of systems, to patch up legacy systems which often means writing the systems in outmoded code, and another option of interfacing current systems with a new cloud-based system which melds to current technology allowing the lender to benefit from the best of both worlds – current (and often old) system familiarity with new technology functionality.
Cross platform integration also has a number of other advantages for lenders. The system needn’t be totally ‘outsourced’.
In-house IT staff can perform many of the ongoing ‘business as usual’ updates, as well as quickly enhancing product details, underwriting data capture requirements and other enhancements to keep one step ahead of competitors and streamlining the end-to-end process from online sales to back office.
The new ‘fintech’ solutions are there to make things simpler, faster and more convenient. Agility, as well as speed and simplicity are the new watchwords for lender processing.
The systems can also cater for most lending types across mainstream mortgage lending to more specialist buy-to-let, second charges, bridging and commercial funding solutions.
With these product types there also comes the issue of catering for a wide variety of customer profiles, income sources and credit statuses.
Regular multi-channel enhancements are needed and the simplicity of in-house configurability means the benefits are substantial, providing greater control over data, along with better and easier access to new customer information for analysis, decision making and future marketing.
2018 will also see the introduction of by the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), the body set up to enable a new, secure way for customers to take control of their financial data and share it with various organisations and their banks, is also overseeing the standards required for the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) launched in January.
Customers using credit cards, prepaid cards and e-wallets will also be able to access open banking services, demonstrating that open banking continues apace and we are one step closer to delivering its potential for the benefit of consumers and lenders.
The standards set by (OBIE) provide a framework to build a common set of Application Program Interface (API) standards that will allow regulated companies safe and secure access to their customers’ accounts, with their permission of course.
These functionalities and standards give even greater confidence to the fintech community to seize the opportunity to participate fully in the financial services ecosystem. And provide lenders with the business efficiencies and opportunities they can deliver, by harnessing the technology to make it easier and safer for individuals and SMEs to share the financial information held by their banks with third parties.
So, the future is upon us, and software houses like BEP are already delivering on some of these new strategies for a range of lenders with varying client databases and product sets. The key is to provide solutions that benefit the business, allow self-servicing for a number of customisable functions, keep the lending nimble and get new product changes and data capture processes quickly to market.
After all, lenders increasingly demand systems that give them a competitive edge and see investing in the latest cloud-based customisable solutions a way of giving them just that.
