As financial institutions (FIs) face the current macroeconomic landscape and an impending global recession, they are beginning to feel the impact on their budgets. As a result, many banks are redirecting their spend towards projects with faster time to value that improve operational efficiency and help control costs.
For lenders, this also means navigating increased risk and higher chances of loan defaults, not to mention new competition threatening their market share, all while continuing to create personalized experiences, winning customers, mitigating risk and managing compliance. That’s no easy feat.
Bankers need to be more efficient with their time
As if all that weren’t challenging enough, many FIs are still operating with legacy architecture, fragmented data and manual processes, which are causing slow and inefficient origination and underwriting processes.
A lot of relationship managers’ and underwriters’ time is spent on administrative work, leaving less time to focus on complex credit cases, driving relationships or providing a personalized experience. These inefficiencies are also accentuated by poor internal collaboration between front, mid- and back-office teams, negatively affecting employee experience and productivity.
Automation with a ‘human’ element
The benefits of automation are clear: it speeds up workflows, cuts down manual tasks, reduces human errors, and improves operational efficiency. In fact, 31% of enterprise organisations in major economies now plan to invest in RPA (Robotic Process Automation), versus 13% a year ago.
But technology and automation aren’t the answer to everything: 78% of SMEs agree that digital transformation of banking needs to be balanced with a human element. The digital aspect will help drive more speed, convenience, and efficiency, while the human side provides apersonalized and transparent service.
FIs need to figure out how to best manage a balance between automation and human engagement that allow bankers the opportunity to add their expertise and give advice to their clients when it’s most needed.
Add value where it’s needed, automate everything else
For relationship managers, it’s critical to automate manual tasks that enable more efficient ways of working so they can refocus their time on higher-value engagements that can help deepen relationships with their clients.
For underwriters, the challenge is striking the right balance between workflow and decisioning automation, while allowing for ‘human’ judgement on more complex credit analysis.
Reimagining employee experience to win the talent war
For lenders globally, this is also a talent acquisition and retention issue. Employee turnover has skyrocketed to 23.4% across FIs of all sizes, representing a 7% increase from last year. Compensation and benefits packages alone aren’t sufficient to win this war for talent.
According to Accenture, 82% of employees say technology plays a part in where they decide to work. The front office experience needs to be radically reimagined if banks are going to be able to attract and retain employees that place a large emphasis on meaningful work and purpose – they don’t want to be spending time on data entry.
Technology’s role
It’s clear that lenders need to ensure they are agile enough to respond to an ever-changing economy and proven technology can help mitigate risk. Creating a partnership with a platform provider that is flexible enough to offer a high level of configuration but that can be adapted as policies or needs change is critical. It must also provide the automation to reduce manual processes and speed up time to offer.
Download the infographic to learn more about how nCino helps FIs boost efficiency so relationship managers and underwriters can save time and do what they do best: grow relationships while providing critical capital.
