Which consumer lending strategies can FIs use to drive growth?

Placing the customer at the center of the lending model through a data-driven approach

Historically, consumer lending has been an in-person experience that revolved around relationships, but with the pandemic accelerating the use of digital channels, and with customers progressively making lending choices based on their digital experiences, innovative lenders are tailoring products to fit their customer needs by using data to personalize that experience. FIs that use data to anticipate and offer the right products, services and experiences to their customers at the right time can create positive customer experiences, which can encourage loyalty, build trust and advance additional banking needs across the spectrum. 

To derive meaningful insights from customer data and deliver real-time offers and services, lenders need to understand the customer from every angle — by aggregating customer data through continuous event streams of transactions and interactions — and home in on signals and life events. While adhering to regulatory and consumer privacy requirements, FIs that break down data and business function silos and work toward establishing a shared customer data repository that is continually enriched can increase transparency and accountability throughout the enterprise. And with every employee on the same page with access to customer data, FIs can shift from offering one-off, compartmentalized lending transactions to offering collective experiences across P&Ls, tailored for each customer.

Leverage technology to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences 

With a recent EY survey reporting that consumers expect FIs to offer truly customized experiences across channels, products and lines of business, delivering differentiated and hyper-personalized customer experiences requires more than just digitizing and customizing front-end processes. It requires leveraging technology to transform front-, middle- and back-office processes to deliver consistent, streamlined customer engagement through an omnichannel experience, regardless of entry point, across the entire lending lifecycle, as well as driving efficiency and cost optimization throughout the lending process itself.

For example, a few large FIs are working to seamlessly integrate the personal touch of legacy banking with innovative technologies to provide an integrated digital experience for their customers across all lending asset classes (mortgage, unsecured, auto, student, etc.). They’re using advanced analytics and trusted digital assistants (through artificial intelligence) to give customers greater access and information to manage their cash flow, balances and transactions or to pay bills while striving to provide little to no differentiation between in-person, web-based or the mobile app customer experience.

Other FIs are leveraging technology to drive efficiency throughout the lending process. For example, FIs can automate and streamline data collection wherever possible by obtaining asset, employment and collateral data through trusted application programming interfaces (APIs), eliminating the need to collect it from the borrower. Subsequently, the FIs can validate both data and processing documentation, reducing fraud and operational risk, while enabling them to make more accurate credit decisions and deliver these decisions faster — nearly instantaneous for card and auto products, with significantly reduced cycle times for mortgage and home equity loans.

Integration with ecosystem partners

The third principle involves integrating ecosystem partners across the lending lifecycle and adjacent services supporting the borrower’s homebuying journey to curate personalized service bundles and provide holistic value to the customer beyond singular transactions. Embracing this principle enables earlier and more effective engagement with the customer to potentially help them save and shop for a lending need before they are drawn to competitors and ensures connectivity with the customer long after the initial transaction is completed.

Our research indicates that consumers’ value propositions are built around life events. Home buying is a high-volume, high-value life event that offers lenders the opportunity to proactively address the next set of customer needs with lending solutions and product or service bundles, giving them the ability to capture their customer’s total addressable wallet as well as promote stickiness, increase brand loyalty and build trust. Brands that are able to drive trust through a seamless and holistic experience and curate products based on needs can differentiate and win in the home-buying market.

Different approaches to consumer lending 

The three core principles are being incorporated, to varying degrees, throughout different consumer lending models. And although some consumer lending approaches may be more effective than others, it’s important to note that one size doesn’t fit all when transforming your FI’s lending model to meet your current challenges. Consumer lending can be viewed on a broad spectrum, reflecting changing customer needs and FI capabilities, with lending models ranging from providing simple transactional loans to delivering omnichannel holistic customer experiences. Let us now explore three approaches to consumer lending transformation. 

Whether it’s mortgage, credit card, student, unsecured or auto loans, some FIs focused on “vertical” lending model transformations are having success enhancing their individual capabilities by upgrading their legacy platforms and technologies to digitize the product-driven consumer lending process to make it more streamlined, automated and personalized.

Although this approach is effective at improving the asset class in focus, there are some issues in employing this lending model. Data remains transactional and siloed, limiting integration and the ability to obtain enterprise-wide insights that can be used by other parts of the business. And instead of delivering a consistent experience across all lending products, customers may realize completely different experiences when requesting a new credit card versus applying for a student loan, for example. In addition, because processes may vary drastically by loan type, this may result in inefficiencies that are increasingly unwieldly for the FI to maintain. Using this model may also leave money on the table, as loan officers within each business unit are incentivized solely for product sales and growth of their individual units, in contrast to capturing the customer’s total addressable wallet across multiple lending products and business functions.

Other FIs are employing a transformation strategy across retail asset classes to drive consistent experiences regardless of channel, product or service desired, with data, process and customer experience silos reduced between business units, product owners and front-, middle- and back-office functions. These silos are replaced by data-enabled customer-centric processes and experiences with a shared customer ownership layer (respective of all applicable privacy regulations) across business functions.

Employing this shared customer ownership model establishes a common and exhaustive data repository to understand the customer from every angle to predict and meet their current and future needs, with data that may include lending and servicing information, signals, triggers, internal transaction history, voice of the customer, channel and other preferences, customer satisfaction survey results, and curated external data.

But this kind of data store may be too complex to curate and maintain. What can be created is a repository with a continuous event data stream of relevant customer transaction history that is continually enriched and leveraged to drive real-time insights for best actions and offers, respective of all applicable privacy regulations. 

Benefits of using the cross-P&L lending approach include improved efficiency and lowered costs by standardizing, simplifying and digitizing front-, middle- and back-office processes across all lending functions. It also enables more effective cross-selling opportunities between business units to increase customer wallet share and generate a personalized customer experience regardless of service or channel desired.

More and more FIs are extending their consumer lending models to create a fully connected lending ecosystem. By broadening the aperture beyond singular lending offerings and providing interconnected services, lenders who establish these ecosystems can effectively integrate partner solutions and curate bundles that serve their customers’ holistic buying needs.

As such, FIs should embrace a fully connected lending ecosystem model by partnering with technology, FinTech and other third-party providers to streamline processes, cut costs and provide the products, services and experiences that their customers want and demand, while increasing wallet share and customer loyalty.

While ecosystem lending is a major consideration and a step many FIs are taking, buy now, pay later (BNPL) and embedded finance models are becoming more mainstream and are also affecting the lending landscape. On the horizon is the emergence of the “super app,” which is a model for “everything banking.” Instead of offering multiple apps with singular functions, such as banking, shopping or making payments, a super app offers a one-stop shop or full ecosystem of products and services in one application. Benefits of the super app approach include leveraging data to deliver new and improved services, growing the customer base with minimal disruptions to the customer experience, using existing digital products and customer experiences to increase brand value in different industries, and offering the opportunity to intercept customers from competitors.