For small businesses today, a digital point-of-sale system is table stakes for conducting business. Merchant processing platforms handle both cash and credit transactions, stay current on inventory, and provide a near-seamless checkout experience for customers. Extend this paradigm even further to their firmly established customer relationships, and merchant processors are in an ideal position to support small businesses with working capital loans.
Still, merchant processors often rely on time-consuming manual processes that leave small business owners frustrated while they await a decision. This was the situation of one such company—a leading global merchant processor that needed multiple systems to communicate with another–just to fund a single small credit request. Wanting to improve the customer experience, increase retention, and fulfill more credit requests, the company sought an automated solution to bring its small business lending processes into the 21st century.
It found one in LendingFront.
Here’s how implementing a small business lending platform helped the company grow its revenue and increase customer stickiness.
Searching for a smarter and automated lending solution
In 2018, the company processed thousands of small business loan applications—but this represented just a fraction of its overall customer base. Not only was the company missing out on a large potential revenue stream, but the average time to funding took almost two weeks, meaning customers lost valuable time waiting for their capital requests to be fulfilled. The company knew it needed to scale, but its systems and processes made it impossible to increase the number of transactions.
The biggest problem? The company had multiple systems for various steps of the process including: application intake, document management, underwriting automation, loan presentation, contracts, and payments. Their ideal platform would consolidate all of these processes, reduce the manual and administrative tasks burdening the team, and maximize efficiency.
LendingFront presented a clear solution. An end-to-end platform, LendingFront enabled the company to bundle all of the lending functions into one—and exponentially increase the number of loans the processor could fulfill—quickly, accurately, and securely.
Skyrocketing to success
The company implemented LendingFront—a process that took just a few months. And the results were transformational.
The number of applications funded jumped more than 80%, and across funded loans, the company provided more than double the capital to its small business customers.
Prior to LendingFront, this company’s application intake and credit checks were handled by several people in separate departments, requiring as much as two weeks of precious time. After implementation, the average time to funding dropped to just a few days.
Strengthening customer relationships
Merchant processors have near-perfect visibility into a company’s cash flow—the single most relevant indicator of how much capital you can extend to them and how easily the merchant can pay it back. What’s more is that merchant processors have the upper hand with their relationships with customers. They just need the right tools to provide not only POS services but also the crucial capital their customers need to expand.
The numbers are impressive, but ultimately, the biggest gain the company made was with its customer relationships. By modernizing its lending platform, the company meets customers where they are, provides the convenience small business owners demand, and continues to foster the ever-important small business economy.
