Comfort went on to express his outlook for the future. "Remember when we first were introduced to online banking in the 1990s? There was a lot of skepticism. Now, we can't imagine life without it. We see the same trend for financial ‘source’ data. Borrowers will start expecting to be able to provide their ‘source data’ directly to lenders to confirm their credit worthiness.”

Other time-consuming tasks are UCC searches and filings. On the front end of a deal, it's important to determine UCC filings that may exist on your potential borrower. This data can come as part of your business report results. You can still go to each secretary of state site to search and file UCCs independently. However, CT Lien Solutions and Corporation Service Company both offer APIs that can be leveraged to automate both the search and filings tasks enabling your operations to simultaneously shorten approval times and free up resources.

Scoring Solutions

When you have different people in your organization doing credit adjudication or you need a more objective view to analyze your credit and report on it, scoring can be a great tool. Typically scoring solutions will involve getting data from a couple different sources. For example, you might want to include customer demographic information such as time in business, a FICO score, and a Master Score from PayNet.

According to Barry Ripes, Managing Director at PayNet, "We increase operational efficiencies.” PayNet does a lot of the analysis that simply wouldn't be feasible for lenders to do on a per borrower basis; at least for small and medium ticket deals. They look at over a 150 variables including macro data on industry, borrower’s size, unemployment by State, delinquency rates by state, etc.  Lenders can immediately weed out deals not in their credit window.

Orion First Financial has recently released a product, SAIPH™, that bridges the gap between Personal Credit Bureau reports, Business Credit Bureau reports and applicant specific information and generates a risk-ranking score. CEO and Founder Dave Schaefer says, "Credit is like a three legged stool where the legs consist of: Guarantor, Borrower, and Application Information. There are products that provide business scores and others that deliver consumer only scores; but until now, none that combine the two plus added specific deal information." Schaefer goes on to say, "This score is not meant to fully replace human adjudication. However it lets credit analysts focus on their true value add. For example, understanding why a florist might be financing a fork lift."

This is also a powerful tool for sales. With one button click, sales professionals can get a score that can drive pricing and syndication decisions. Dave also sees this as a product that will continue to evolve as they integrate cash flow data sources to further strengthen their solution. Adding one more leg to the stool is on their immediate roadmap.

All these services are API driven. That means that they are ready to be connected to your lease/loan management system. Building these APIs into your web application or workflow engine will keep you competitive in this environment. This ultimately allows you to provide your borrower a seamless customer experience to achieve their goals while increasing your operational efficiencies.