Digital Documents: The Last Mile Towards Achieving Fully Digital Lending

Digital lending transformation is focused on moving data to the cloud and conducting point-of-sale transactions via the Web and mobile devices. In addition, core lending and banking systems are gradually moving to cloud lending platforms. These are important areas of technology innovation for financial institutions to build and deliver fully digital banking to their customers, trading partners and employees. These technologies have made dramatic improvement for short, simple transactions that don’t require documents, or that require one or two simple documents.

While data moves synchronously in digital loan origination, lending documents typically move asynchronously via courier, fax, or email attachment. Taking a photo of a driver’s license and emailing it is a necessary-but not sufficient-process to become fully digital. Many types of retail and commercial lending require numerous documents for loan application, identification, credit evaluation, collateral assessment, compliance, and contracting. Financial institutions can achieve greater efficiency and provide better customer service by moving from paper-based document lending to digital document-based lending using enterprise content management (ECM) systems. ECM has been very productive in discrete parts of retail banking and lending, and in the past decade has led to:

·The transition of cancelled paper check scanning from a back-office process to a front-office remote deposit capture process on smart phones.

·Digitizing driver’s license photos to authenticate loan applicants for credit card loans or personal loans via mobile apps or online.

·Continued growth of ECM for auto, home equity and mortgage loan onboarding, servicing, legal and compliance purposes.

·Gradually increasing ECM growth in the loan account opening process.