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Just add tech: the lower-cost route to expanding business

What’s the right way to grow a business?

Some challenges are complex for lenders to solve immediately. For example, interest rate competition and compliance costs are challenging options to base a growth strategy on long-term. That’s why we favor strategies that emphasize expanding your business capabilities.

There are a few different paths to achieving this.

For context, let’s look at the efficiency ratio. This is produced by dividing a bank’s noninterest expenses (i.e., staff salaries, office space, technology, etc.) by their net income. According to FDIC data, the average efficiency ratio for FDIC banks was 60.46% across the industry. These figures mean that most lenders spend more than 50 cents out of every dollar earned in sustaining operations. Improving that ratio by a few percentage points would represent a significant boost to your business.

A traditional approach to this emphasizes growing by adding staff, offices, and other resources. With this approach, a lender will likely respond to positive growth by opening new offices and hiring additional account managers to seek new customers. In addition, they might decide to go down the acquisition route, buying out another lender in whole or in part. These methods work, yet they come with the significant disadvantage of high to very high costs and processes becoming more challenging to standardize without the help of technology.

The digital transformation approach to growing a lending business is different. You use business rules, automation, and related measures to process transactions through a single system. Customers are equipped with a seamless digital experience to open new accounts, while chatbots and other automated systems can handle the most basic customer service inquiries. Rather than needing more hires to deal with an increased workload, commercial lending staff has more time to focus on developing new accounts and complex customer service requests.

Digital transformation as a growth catalyst

At its essence, digital transformation makes use of newer technologies to increase efficiency. Past efforts to boost efficiency through software have yielded some returns; however, traditional software requires costly implementation efforts and provide no single view of the customer. As a result, commercial lenders end up resorting to manual workarounds, like consulting multiple systems throughout the loan application and approval process.

Solifi Floorplan Finance platform is different.

Solifi Floorplan finance software is a turnkey solution that makes it easy to improve customer service and offer more services to your current client base. There are four specific ways you can use Floorplan Finance software to grow your lending business:

1. A single customer view

Instead of waiting for an annual account review to gather data from multiple sources, you can simply login to your customer dashboard and check the customer’s financial information fast, saving resources and time.

2. Faster lending decisions

With Solifi Floorplan finance software, you can make faster decisions through clear workflow processing and automated steps, as well as easily offering or cross-selling alternative loan types.

3. Reduce the burden of admin and manual reporting

Lending involves plenty of administrative activities. As we all know, when we’re trying to dig out documents from weeks to months before, it can take a lot of work to prepare deals thoroughly –
combining data from several sources and manually verifying it takes a lot of effort! With a single view, you can fulfill your administrative needs faster without hiring more staff.

4. Service sells

Many lenders say they offer better services to their customers than their competitors. Of course, making such bark-but-no-bite statements doesn’t attract customer attention the way it used to – but what if you could sell an experience like “24-hour lending decisions”? These pledges are already becoming common in consumer lending for credit cards and mortgages.

Achieving a full digital transformation is ultimately one of the best ways to grow your loans without continually hiring new staff and hoping they can catch on with the myriad of systems you’re using.

Next-Generation Wholesale Finance Software

If you’re looking for ways to enhance your existing floorplan finance offering, Solifi Wholesale Finance software can take your floorplan lending operation to new heights.

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Solifi Open Finance Platform

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