LAFAYETTE, La. -- Lisa Bourque is no techie, so what she likes about her high-tech tools from her credit union's core processor is that "they're simple as possible to use, for people like me!"
Bourque is vice president of lending for Lafayette Schools' Federal Credit Union, an $80 million institution with just under 11,000 members and no IT department.
"That would be me and the operations person," Bourque says. So, she says, she and her staff have quickly taken to the LoanAdvantage lending software the CU runs as an ASP from its longtime core processor, IntegraSys.
In the past few months, Lafayette Schools' has added several upgrades to the system, including instant pre-approval and more recently, the Application Analyzer feature, a Web-based screen that displays debt ratios, relationship with the credit union, credit scores, loan-to-value ratio...the variables the loan officer needs to see when analyzing applications that don't meet the criteria for instant pre-approval.
"Before we had this, we had to look at all these things on separate screens," Bourque says. "It was doable, and not hard to do, but having it all in one place, right in your face, makes it easier."
IntegraSys added the Application Analyzer at the same time as its new lending performance pages, which provides a screen-shot view of the credit union's loan activity, including portfolios, loans in progress and current and previous workloads.
Bourque says her credit union is not currently using that feature, but is actively using the Application Analyzer. Applications for review reside in a queue until loan officers click on the application summary to review details. The system allows for easy analysis of applications, the company says, and includes features such as allowing notes to be added without opening the full loan application.
Upgrades to the LoanAdvantage platform are made based on input from customer credit unions, IntegraSys says.
"What we do is go out there and put ourselves in the shoes of the person making that lending decision. That's how we came up with all these," says Antoinette Ren?, the business analyst manager who leads the LoanAdvantage team for the Fiserv core processing unit.
"Working with our clients, we determined that they need tools that would allow them to streamline their processes, and to be able to get a visual of where their business stood in that moment of time as well as a view going backward," Ren? says.
Since it runs as an ASP, deploying the new features is relatively painless, Bourque says. "For the Application Analyzer, we simply filled out a questionnaire on how we do underwriting, the criteria we wanted to set according to our policies. They e-mailed it to me and I e-mailed it back to them. "I'm not a techie person and I can get through it." Lafayette Schools' FCU has been a client of IntegraSys and its predecessors since 1982 and runs the core platform as a service bureau solution, along with the Virtual Branch online banking platform that hosts the instant loan application service. "We do everything through the service bureau and it's all Web-based and easy to do, and we get great support from IntegraSys," Bourque says. "But there are so many enhancements coming along that we're finally going to have to hire a systems analyst who can do the R&D for us here to help us keep up with what we're using and not using and whether we should be." --mrapport@sc.rr.com
