The loan document automation industry won’t tell you that the documents were never the problem.
Walk into almost any commercial lending operation today, and you’ll find compliant loan documents. The compliance boxes get checked, the packages get written and the loans are closed — eventually. But for all the talk and implementation of artificial intelligence, cloud-native platforms and intelligent automation, many lending teams are still doing the same manual work they’ve been doing for years.
The problem for commercial lenders isn’t the quality of their closing software’s documents, but every constraint that happens before and around the creation of them. Take a step back and look at the work happening around the closing documents you’re trying to get to your borrower. How much time is spent reentering data in your closing software that’s already sitting in your loan origination system? How often does a small change mean starting over on a document package? How many closings take longer than they should because people are waiting on manual steps?
These are all signs that your team is doing work the technology itself should be performing.
You Bought Document Automation. Why Is Your Team Still Doing the Work?
Legacy document tools were built to produce compliant loan documents. That was the software’s goal, and it’s one most of them achieve. But rather than the tool doing the work, your team carries the weight of reentering the data, cross-referencing the package, waiting through the review cycle and rebuilding the document when something changes at the eleventh hour.
Financial institutions are left wondering why tools that were meant to automate the creation of commercial loan documents haven’t improved efficiencies like they thought they would. It’s because their teams are forced to compensate for a system that was never designed to do the whole job. Every one of those friction points is time your people aren’t spending on borrowers. They are also the reason deals slow down at the finish line, not because the deal fell apart but because the technology supporting it was never built for the pace the market now demands. What other vendors call automation is really filling out a template.
Every Internal Delay Eventually Reaches the Borrower
The commercial borrower sitting across the table from your team today has spent the last decade getting used to a radically different pace of life. They tap a button, and money moves. They sign a document from their phone at 10 p.m. They get real-time status updates on everything that matters to them. When they ask for a faster close, they don’t mean faster than your competitor across town, they mean faster like everything else in their personal and professional life.
If your document workflow takes five days when it should take five minutes, you’re losing to a higher set of expectations that the rest of the digital economy already set. The institutions pulling ahead right now have modernized the entire document production workflow. The ones falling behind are losing because the process that delivers their documents is still slow, fragile and dependent on people who may not be there next year.
What lenders should be looking for is a vendor that has approached the problem like a modern software as a service solution rather than a legal department creating online templates. A fintech provider should offer an automated platform that scales with your volume without adding headcount. They should provide compliance updates automatically as the regulatory landscape changes, without anyone on your team having to track it or wait on a vendor release cycle. They should also allow your teams to work in the system they already use, without toggling between platforms, reentering data multiple times and doing manually what their software should be doing automatically.
Commercial lending velocity is accelerating. The commercial lenders that recognize the benefit of integrating the document generation process into their lending workflow will be better set to compete in a market of accelerated loan cycles, compressed margins and increased competition.
When looking for a solution to generate commercial loan documents, don’t buy the documents. Buy a process that your closing team won’t dread, one that scales with your lending portfolio and keeps pace with a digital-first borrower. That’s where you’ll find true efficiency and value.
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