7 ways to help increase loans

Remember when lending used to be easy?  Members would dress in their Sunday best, come into the branch to make a good impression, and practically beg you for a loan? Yeah, we don’t remember that either. But lending has evolved drastically in the last few years.  The days of in-person apps are going away.

Today, when members ask you for money, they’re quite often in their jammies, not their Sunday best. It’s all about convenience and speed, and members accessing your services on their time! Sure members might come into your branch to apply for a loan, but they’re more likely to use the following:

• Call Center
• Online  (24/7)
• Mobile (24/7)
• Tablet   (24/7) 

At the heart of the appeal of all these channels is the member’s desire for a quick response and immediacy: instant decisions, e-signature capability, and a fast turn-around (closing a loan in minutes rather than in days). So, if this is today’s playing field, here are a few options to explore that can help you increase loans and stay in the game:

1. Go Mobile for Loans

• Go out to your SEG groups or a partner dealer.
• Enable members to open new accounts remotely.
• Take loan applications remotely and provide an instant decision.
• With an iPad, the member can sign their documents with their finger!

2. Use Social Media to Get the Word Out!

• Market your products and services letting your members know you have what they need.
• Create contests and have fun!

3. Educate your Members

Before your members decide to purchase a car, they do some research.

• Be relevant during the research process by providing them the tools and the tips they are looking for.
• Educate them on what they need to know before they buy a car so they can get the best deal.
• Pre-qualifying saves time and hassle at the dealership.
• 0% financing by the dealer vs. CU financing.
• Add-on fees/products – cost more at the dealers.

4. Loan Ideas

• Offer a payday loan alternative.
• Create a program for subprime borrowers.
• 90 days no interest loans.
• Consider extending new car loans out to 84 months. (Almost 25% of new cars financed in Q1 of 2014 were extended for 7 years.)

5. Auto Loan Recapture

• Identify members who have auto loans elsewhere and who could save a min of $XX by refinancing.
• Make a personal, specific offer and quote:
• Rate
• Monthly payments
• Annual savings (“Here is exactly how much we can save you in a year.”)

6. Expand Indirect Opportunities

• Market to members according to life milestones to get CU loans from retail financing … aka Lifestyle Lending.
• Create new indirect relationships with local businesses such as:
• Dentists
• Furniture/Appliance stores
• Veterinarians
• Plastic Surgeons
• Provide them with quick responses and competitive rates.
• Everyone wins!

7. Target Gen Y Early

• Help them establish credit with a small loan, no application fee, a competitive rate, and a one-year repayment term.
• This will:
• Establish a relationship with that borrower,
• Give the CU an opportunity to interact and educate them
• Help build credit.

With so many lenders vying for the same share of mind and wallet, if you really want to connect with members you need to get creative with your loan strategies. 

Loan applicants? They’re out there. Sitting at the breakfast table in their bunny slippers with their smartphone in hand with no plan to visit your branch. You need to be the solution at their fingertips.

Yvonne Sambrano

Sr. Lending Product Manager

EPL, Inc.

The cost of old equipment

Every year credit unions go through a budget process to determine hardware and software requirements for their employees.  Unfortunately, many credit unions want to write off their equipment’s depreciation over a sixty-month time period and then continue to utilize the equipment far beyond it’s life expectancy.   

COSTS

I believe credit unions who follows this scenario fail to understand the real cost for delaying hardware and software upgrades.  These costs typically first show up when hardware fails.  Even if new hardware fails within the first year, it is typically covered by a warranty and can be either serviced on-site or expressed back to the vendor for repairs.  

Repairing older hardware, however, can cost more because newer replacement hardware (disks, memory, and I/O card interfaces, etc.) may not be 100% compatible with the existing hardware.  Existing devices, motherboard firmware and operating system, as an example, may not fully support the capabilities of the new replacement part.  This more than likely will cause unexplained and intermittent operating system crashes that can cause lost employee productivity and inadequate customer service to the members.  

Lost productivity has a soft cost to the organization, particularly when an employee is forced to seek time on another employee’s PC or must deal directly with a support technician before they can continue their assigned job role. Another cost is the member’s negative experience with the employee that can jeopardize how a credit union is viewed by their members.

PERFORMANCE

Replacing older hardware and software ensures that employees are not having to wait on a slow PC to respond.  Older hardware will not perform as well each time new software products are installed or upgraded over time.  In addition, newer software products such as Microsoft Excel and Word files shared between different software versions could slow done the employee when having to deal with incompatibility issues. Also, the software industry typically adds features based on a number of factors but one specific factor is hardware value to performance.  As an example, a PC purchased 3 years ago for $1,000 will not perform as well as a PC purchased today for the same $1,000.   

RECOMMENDATION

With the low cost of PCs today, hanging on to old equipment is not very cost effective.  My recommendation is to plan for a third of a credit union’s PCs to be updated each year in rotation.  PCs should be written off in a 36 month asset depreciation schedule. Doing this will ensure your PCs are replaced every 36 months avoiding many of the issues that older hardware and software may cause.  This will significantly improve your employee’s productivity and ensure credit union members receive the service they expect.

EPL Staff

EPL, Inc. 

Omni-Channel: next generation technology = new revenue generation

As always, revenue generation is a top priority for financial services. The obstacles to meeting this goal, however, are greater than ever. Financial Services providers are under unprecedented pressures to:

• keep costs down
• find new revenue streams by offering new services
• discover ways to leverage technology that improves the way they deliver services so as to retain and reach more customers.

 That’s no small order, but there is an answer.

To meet these challenges, many institutions are developing future branch models that leverage people, processes and technology to drive new revenue. They’re doing this by creating a 3D video-based Omni-channel environment which can help offer a more consistent and integrated approach to delivering products and services to consumers across all channels.

This “next generation” branch transformation is expanding and integrating technology that enables virtual face-to-face meetings with high definition video, which allows a financial institution to centralize their subject matter experts and make them available to all branches.

Consider this. While mobile channels are growing and customers’ visits to branches are less frequent, branches still fulfill a critical role in new customer acquisition and cross-selling for more complex transactions like mortgages, business services and investments. Conducting these transactions via video enhances the financial institution’s ability to provide more services at a time that is most beneficial to the consumer. Through the integration of video into the branch’s infrastructure and other channels, financial services are able to support a customer’s needs with subject matter experts at much more cost-effective method while increasing sales and service. High-definition video, 3D imagining and video communication solutions are changing the landscape, and let customers meet virtually with real-live experts in an intimate, face-to-face exchange. It feels and looks as though your experts are sitting right across the desk from them!

This new technology, within self-service channels, allows financial services providers to transform their branch model, plus improve efficiencies and consumer experiences. Additionally, this technology allows other retail representatives to engage consumers on complex needs, cross-sell other services, and expand their reach beyond a teller platform to more advanced services. This winning, new revenue formula leverages next generation technology, and centralized platform of experts that connects products and services with more consumers when it’s most convenient for them and for you!

Robin Kolvek

SVP, Business Development

EPL, Inc.

How to cultivate your subject matter experts (SMEs)

It takes a team to run and grow your credit union.  Does your team have unique talents and expertise that contributes to the credit union's overall success?  Do you truly have Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) or do you have people in their roles that do their jobs because it has, “always been done that way?”  

When met with new challenges your team must have the drive to learn and continue growing their expertise. 

How do you inspire your team to be SMEs that will not only allow you to better serve your members? How do you encourage them to continue personal growth and driven to find better ways to improve efficiency and member satisfaction? How do you cultivate peer influencers and managers? 

EPL is a company that is committed to growing our staff to become SMEs and is also committed to working with credit unions to help their staff become SMEs. So, how can EPL and credit unions work together to make sure your staff knows how to use your core data system most effectively and have SMEs throughout your organization?

• Help your staff build their credentials to become SMEs: This can be done through internal and external education, through ongoing experiences and solving problems
• Ensure key people attend training sessions: Remember, no constructive question is unreasonable. Make sure staff understands what is being presented and encourage discussion.  Share information in the training session about how new processes will benefit the credit union.  Have the team communicate internally what they learn, ask them what they learned and how it will benefit your credit union?
• Network with other credit unions (like with our e3Community): EPL has created a networking forum to allow credit unions to discuss, ask and respond to best practices and challenges. 
• Encourage staff to be ambassadors for their area: Allow them to be influencers on processes that are established.  Consider having processes reviewed by your credit union partners to be sure they are optimizing system functionality.
• Have your SMEs conduct training: When your SME is the team trainer in specific areas, they tend to continue improving their knowledge. Have them record their training session to improve their own delivery and to keep an electronic resource available for future staff or to share with other credit unions
• Your team will respond to praise: Recognize SMEs internally to staff and managers.  You can also acknowledge them externally in credit union publications and board communications.  Finally, consider recognizing them as experts in industry networking forums. Soon other credit unions will be seeking out your SMEs for good ideas advice for better execution.

Cultivation of SMEs helps to grow your team professionally, motivates and retains your best people and provides a resource for other credit unions to gain key ideas to help their credit unions to grow as well.

EPL Staff

EPL, Inc. 

CUs helping CUs as people helping people

If two heads are better than one … imagine what we could ALL do together!!!

Online social communities are changing the game for leaders, customers, employees, brands and our culture.  These online communities have real business value when it comes to learning from others and collaborating because many of us are working towards common goals for our business and professional lives.

That's why EPL introduced the e3 Community, made up of people who share a common purpose in the credit union industry.  The goal is to enhance the way credit unions collaborate - to draw on individual strengths, share perspectives and learn from each other in a vibrant, synergistic environment.  

What does “e3” stand for? 
Its all about Evolution, Extension, and Exploration. 

When you think about it, it represents the whole credit union philosophy of "People Helping People!"

The e3 community is a “learning community” designed to help foster opportunities for people to work together, solve problems, and generate ides … and its a convenient way to do so – anytime, anywhere. And the more information you have, the smarter the decisions you’ll make for your credit union. 

So what can you learn?  

Question… are you interested in collaborating with other credit unions to learn:

• What products worked for them
• How they increased their loan portfolio
• How they are dealing with new regulations
• Or, working together to share credit union resources and help each other in times of need?

There are over 600 users on our e3 Community accessing knowledge, collaborating and voting on ideas for our credit union system.

We’ve seen many great examples of knowledge sharing in our online community. A great example is a credit union that was very new to the EPL system who reached out for other’s experiences with the popular instant card issue solution.  They wanted to know if anyone in the group had already made the decision to go with a solution, if they could share their experiences and what choices and options were best.  We saw several willing credit unions reach out and make recommendations.  EPL staff shared other’s experiences as well and also shared “comparison” and “things to consider” information.   

We’ve also seen a lot of input in the world of compliance and security, which all credit unions know is one of the biggest hurdles in the industry. 

There are heightened expectations and many risks facing you today so unlocking the value of peer collaboration to share best practices and build productive relationships is key.  This is what the community is all about, being able to reach out to others, whether a peer credit union leader or an EPL subject matter expert … We are informally bound together in this network by shared expertise and passion for a common endeavor!

The community is about Diversity!  It increases the opportunity for diversity of thought and approaches as an online community atmosphere can eliminate the boundaries of location, philosophies, and even personality styles.  The outcomes … enhanced potential for all members, the possibility that new knowledge will be created and the enhancement of the effectiveness of the overall credit union movement. 

Rhiannon Stone

VP, Solutions Delivery

EPL, Inc