Why agile processes and technology are essential to revolutionise lending

Agile technology can help financial services organisations streamline backend operations and quickly adapt to market changes, which all works to improve customer experiences.

But how can this technology help banks pivot to compete on lending? 

Streamlining backend operations

First and foremost, financial institutions must audit their backend operations to gain insight into where they can become more efficient and streamline workflows to reduce bottlenecks. This can be done through process mining. By leveraging real-time data analysis, financial services institutions can monitor their operations to truly understand what is happening.

So, once banks know where the inefficiencies lie, they can solve these issues and focus on increasing productivity and profitability. This can lead to – for example - faster underwriting and loan processing times, which improves the efficiency and streamlines lending practices. 

Beneficially, with continuous technological development, financial services organisations can easily make gradual innovations in their operations to quickly test and learn from new ideas. Banks can use this agility to experiment with new lending processes for underwriting, credit checking and risk assessment in order to improve innovation and efficiency in their lending processes. 

Getting customer service right

Customers should be put at the heart of the lending process. Through integrating real-time customer data into operations and using them to inform decision-making for the bank, this leads to more personalised services for lending and credit risk decisions.

Agile can help this happen when it is applied to how financial services institutions leverage data for predictive analytics to understand and monitor customer behaviour. This also unlocks other valuable insights for example into fraud detection and know your customer (KYC) processes. As agile frameworks ensure continuous checking of operations, any potential risks can be identified much earlier. This minimises the risk of losses, and ensures better stability for the financial services organisation and their customers. 

It is also important for banks to take customer feedback on board and they can do this through innovating their operations on a regular basis. With constant customer engagement, it creates a strong feedback loop which is critical in understanding whether these processes are preferred by customers or not. Through integrating these insights, it ensures that financial services institutions can transform their lending processes on an ongoing basis to create one which is customer-centric and competitive and meets changing needs.

Adhering to regulation

The financial services sector as a whole is heavily regulated, so banks must be able to adapt quickly to these changes at local, national and international levels. By leveraging agile technology and processes, financial institutions can quickly and easily transform their operations to one which complies with the regulations, without significant disruption to their lending services and operations on the back end and for their customers. Due to ongoing updates of systems and operations, it is much easier for financial services organisations to comply with regulations, and avoid hefty fines and any potential reputational damage. 

It is no secret that the financial services industry is transforming at a rapid rate, so banks must focus on creating agile, flexible and efficient operations to keep up with competition and market and customer demand. Agile processes and technology also position financial services institutions for future growth and continued innovation in an ever changing landscape.