Financial Network, Inc.: Powering Loan Workflows with Next-Gen Automation

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Pat Sabisch, CCO

When we talk about Covid-19 and its impact on a market, few industries have been affected more foundationally than the business of lending; and even more specifically the many faces of consumer lending. The lending processes itself and at its core the understanding of the customer need a fundamental re-write to take into account the post pandemic reality. Who represents a good risk? Can they pay? Should I structure a new loan type & will it perform? With Covid-19 as a backdrop, what used to be straightforward and predictable is now complex and changing. Since Covid-19 has driven most lending online, even the basic conversation with the customer has changed.

To take advantage of this accelerated change, most lenders are examining their technology stack as their key limiting factor. At the heart of the lending process is the Loan Origination Platform which sits at the center of a complex web of internal and external systems. When optimized, the LOS ensures lenders are nimble and can converse with their customers in real time whether online, in a store or at a branch. Many loans today happen in a single conversation, but when systems or decisions are still happening in siloes the lending process bogs down and systems become the primary liability, not the consumer’s credit score!

This is where Financial Network Inc. (FNI) comes in.

Founded in 1985, FNI offers an end to end loan automation platform designed to optimize a lender’s existing infrastructure, plug its gaps, & ensure a high performance real-time “mobile first” experience for the consumer. The company stands as the market expert working with many of the largest lenders in the country where automation & scale are most critical. These lenders leverage FNI in a hub & spoke deployment where FNI ensures flexible product creation & deployment across the multiple touchpoints with the customer. Since FNI is the hub, consistency of message, KYC & compliance are baked in, allowing a multichannel lender to shape their conversations and messages.

At the same time, FNI has focused on taking their high performance LOS capabilities and packaging the platform for start-ups, single-product lenders & the mid-market. Here there are less IT resources but the same complex requirements. Ensuring these smaller lenders can compete while reducing costs & simplifying lending has removed vendor dependency from the equation & enabled FNI to support very fast new deployments & easy new product creation. “One of the most important aspects of a good LOS is ensuring that it can be deployed in a matter of weeks not months & that our customers are trained how to use it to make changes from day 1” says Devin Archer, leader of new business development at FNI. “A culture where a lender can’t respond to a market requirement because they are waiting on a vendor just can’t scale and ensures the lender misses new opportunities instead of leveraging them.

Devin Archer, Leader of New Business

No one wants that!” FNI’s open platform with drag & drop designers makes it easy to implement and test changes ensuring FNI’s product is accessible to a business user.

At the heart of FNI’s broad market play is BluePrint, a SaaS deployed platform designed with “out-of-the-box” support for most consumer loan types. During a new deployment, a lender simply modifies their BluePrint to look and operate the way they want it. This is accomplished through a series of drag and drop admins that make system configuration simple. At the same time, since BluePrint is services based, connecting to portals, other systems or 3rd party data is simplified and flexible. There are very few limitations on how the system can work. If a lender can imagine it, you can generally accomplish it without delay and without needing IT’s help.

The most complicated thing for machine learning models is to extract meaningful information from data and simplify results for better outcomes

Where FNI’s Blueprint LOS has been designed for simplicity and ensures simple workflow & design, it is still powered by FNI’s world class DecisionCore. DecisionCore is a next generation decision engine that sits at the center of workflow, processes, & credit policy. Strategies are created and deployed by end users to make testing and creative thinking easy to deploy. DecisionCore is designed to adhere to compliance requirements, test new ideas in a sandbox & then roll them into production enabling reporting & analytics along the way. With all of the new and interesting information becoming accessible and potentially relevant including A.I. & neural nets to name a few, enabling that data is where many lenders struggle. DecisionCore is designed to unlock data, integrate with new approaches, and ensure a lender can operationalize their competitive understanding into the lending practice.

Covid-19 has taught us all that much of the way we used to do business won’t last as we enter the post pandemic reality. Consumers have been trained to interact online and lenders must be able to talk with their customers though automation. At the heart of these new conversations is the LOS when its done right. The newly imagined LOS makes marketing better. It makes the website better. It makes your customer interactions better because it improves personalization across systems at scale. The heartbeat of a next generation LOS is actionable understanding of the customer in that singular moment and guiding them to a best result. FNI’s BluePrint&DecisionCore enable that complex conversation while leveraging your existing IT infrastructure bringing new life to your IT stack, and empowering your marketing and sales efforts where its needed.

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Company
Financial Network, Inc.

Headquarters
St. Louis, MO

Management
Pat Sabisch, CCO and Devin Archer, Leader of New Business

Description
Financial Network, Inc. offers comprehensive support for lending, origination, and analytical operations. FNI solutions are built on a set of time-tested components, with solutions for the Financial, Insurance, Collections, and numerous other industries. Through 25 years of providing custom credit lending solutions, Financial Network, Inc. stands as the market expert in robust credit lending platforms. Based on our experience creating truly custom products, we have assembled FNI Turnkey and FNI Turnkey Plus solutions. These FNI Turnkey solutions are the culmination of the best practices that can only come from years of experience. For clients seeking a fully customized solution, FNI has custom solutions in place with 3 of the 5 largest U.S. banks and lending institutions.