Improving Loan Portfolio Performance

*Originally published on CUInsight.com

Financial institutions are continually tasked by their boards with optimizing the performance of their loan portfolio. Today’s low-interest rate environment is continuing to drive both interest and volume at many financial institution loan portfolios, making improving loan portfolio optimization more important than ever. 

According to Celent, here are three ways to improve your loan portfolio performance with consumer experience top-of-mind:

1. Give account holders what they want!

Recent research from Celent showed that U.S. banks and credit unions reported a 41% ¹ increase in real-time payments during the pandemic. With consumers from 2,000 financial institutions in the U.S. already using Zelle, it’s clear that demand for real-time payments is already here. Offering real-time payment products could particularly be the key for your customers or members who seem like consumer account holders on paper, but are actually small business owner members. By offering real-time payment options, such as real-time disbursements, or Any2Any account transfers, you are giving them more control over their money movement needs any time of day, which brings us to the next point.

2. Give consumers control over their finances

Traditionally, late payers were penalized with large fees for missing their payment due dates, sometimes through simple faults in the clearing and settlement offerings in the bill payment ecosystem (we are looking at you ACH). Consumers now have an alternative for expedited payments, giving them the full procrastination window of the due date, not just the 2-3 days in advance an ACH payment requires, or a full week for a check to be cut and sent. Coupled with an ability to diarize (request on a future date) payments, account holders should never be caught by surprise by having to pay a late payment fee again. For financial institutions, real-time has many advantages—better margins, better insights, and of course, receipt of funds faster (and in the case of TCH’s RTP irrevocable). Also, flexible channels and payment options such as pay by text or pay by AI assistant make it easier, and therefore more likely for your payees to pay their loans on time.

3. Utilize Request For Payment

Request For Payment (RfP), a message capability that has entered the market with push-based real-time payments (e.g. Zelle, RTP, and soon to be FedNow), adds additional functionality to real-time payments beyond the payment itself. Real-time isn’t just about speed, it’s also a data-rich messaging system that supports “chatter-based” payments. Using RfP to open up a conversation with your customer or member, whose payment account resides at another institution, allows them to have better control over their finances by either choosing when they want to pay or and directly from the source of the payment itself. That flexibility could greatly improve collection rates while offering a higher level of security in the payment workflow as the payment messages are not going over a channel like SMS or email. Instead, they go directly through the payment channel to another financial institution, to be viewed by the account holder in a secure location. In addition, because RfPs are tied directly to the transaction itself, it saves financial institutions on reconciling invoices and lowering the number of checks and processing costs associated with manual processing. 

¹ Celent “State of the Payments Nation Survey”, May 2022

Today’s legacy and siloed banking technology infrastructure limit financial institutions’ ability to rapidly innovate. It’s time to look at money movement in a new way. Alacriti’s Orbipay Unified Money Movement Services does just that. Whether it’s real-time payments, digital disbursements, or bill pay, our cloud-based platform enables banks and credit unions to quickly and seamlessly deliver modern digital payments and money movement experiences. To speak to an Alacriti payments expert, please call us at (908) 791-2916 or email info@alacriti.com.