Variety of ways to communicate with your customers

In the early days of lending and banking, a face to face discussion was paramount. Often, the small business owner or the individual client will visit a branch or an office to speak to a banker or a lending officer.

These official visits are often formal and time consuming. However, in order for the bank to lend any money, the banker must know who you are, and go through the four Cs of credit with the client before extending any credit through the bank.

The four Cs of credits are Character, Capacity, Capital and Collateral. Today, we can easily assess these four Cs of Credit through a variety of different means. For instance, a personal character or his ability to repay his loans are easily attained through a credit report of a background check. Capacity, which is debt-to-income ratio, can easily be calculated from his or her bank statement or a variety of open banking tools available to us today. As to Capital and Collateral, there are asset verification tools that can easily assess the home, car or cashflow of a business or an individual. 

However, we haven’t fully automated communication. There are so many situations where an application or a loan can result in a favorable or unfavorable outcome depending on data, timing and terms. Communication is a key to reducing errors, winning over the client and reducing assumptions and misunderstandings.

Today, lenders utilize many digital channels to communicate with their clients. In lieu of a branch visit, a client can start an online application at the convenience of their home or their office. A real time underwriting is determined by a credit decision engine. 

Documentation requests are also sent to the client via email or a phone call. With the advent of mobile devices, lenders are now able to take customer communication to a whole new level. 

Phone calls and email are dead

For the past decade and with the popularity of the internet and mobile phones, lenders are calling, sometimes robo-dialing clients with marketing messages or maybe solicitations of sorts. These spam calls are often blocked by our mobile internet carriers.

Lately, mobile phone makers and their operating system partners have also introduced a vast array of filters to reduce the amount of spam calls we encounter on a daily basis.

These spam calls are often generated by bots and some have estimated that we will soon have 6 billion or so AI agents dialing our mobile phones on a constant basis. The United States and similar European countries have introduced privacy laws that punish spam callers but these companies set up their operations offshore to avoid regulators and law enforcement.

With decades of education, consumers are well aware of spam calls and scams. Some have gone so far as to not answer their calls except for those that are on their contact list to avoid unnecessary calls, even unintentionally blocking legitimate calls from their banks and lenders.

Emails use to be a great way to communicate with one another besides a phone call or a snail mail, but that mode of communication has been tainted as well with even more spams and fraudulent attempts that companies like Microsoft and Google have to setup massive team and invest heavily in technology to deflect these spam emails from indentate their customers and causing everyone massive amount of headache and worse financial harm.

A generational shift is also in play here. People born in the mobile internet or the iPhone era have evolved to live their lives around their mobile devices, which includes communicating with each other and their banks or lenders. Testing is now the more preferred method of communication amongst the younger generation.

The rise of texting

There are roughly 25 billion texts being sent per day, twice as much as phone calls globally. Texting is most certainly the most preferred way of communication amongst all humans living on this planet.

Banks and lenders must adopt a new strategy when it comes to communicating with their clients and we are here to provide the easiest way for lenders to text their clients. Introducing LendAPI’s one of a kind direct-to-device texting services built into our loan core.

From the lender’s point of view, texting is a way to stay on top of compliance issues that may arise from a casual conversation taking place in a call center. We can contextually mine the conversation for any issues that may arise from a texting session.

For organizations with multiple people working in customer service, you can chat with the same client and see the previous conversations to continue solving issues for the end client. Group chat is also a great way to keep folks informed on the other end of the line. If there are spouses, real estate agents or document processors that are in a related party which need to be kept informed, group chat is a great way to keep everyone engaged to complete the lending process.

There are a variety of templates and A.I. systems available where the banks and lenders can provide speedy services to their clients without any human involvement and only escalate situations where A.I. aren’t able to resolve situations easily.

We can clearly see the benefit of texting and embedding texting within the lending software will take the banking’s lending activity to a whole new level. Let’s take a look at some of the key features of LendAPI’s Texting Platform.

LendAPI Direct-to-Device Texting Solution

Phone Number Management

We can assign a phone number to you and take care of all the necessary technology needs without having to lift a finger. We take all of the configuration, settings and connectivity to major mobile carriers out of your hands to get you set up to communicate instantly.

Texting Templates

We know that the majority of the conversation whether it's in person, over the phone or texting are essentially the same and repetitive. We created templating technology for you to develop templates which your agents can use over and again without having to type and long message, and therefore saves a ton of time and reduces errors.

Text Error Handling

We have a variety of ways to handle issues such as wrong phone numbers or issues with messages that aren’t sent correctly. You come to rely on these features on your own mobile phone, we’ve brought the same features here on LendAPI’s device-to-text mobile platform.

Texting, the final frontier

If you are want to stay connected with your clients, convert them faster and create a brand that they won’t forget, we believe stay in touch with via text is an private and unique way of engaging your clients every step of the way,

With the introduction of the LendAPI Embarc LMS, you can also text your clients with important information post originations. Each payment reminder, statements and debit card expiration will be notified via text messaging. 

LendAPI will also introduce video chatting through text messaging in the next generation of our texting platform where the recipient will receive a link to launch a video chatting program so the bankers and customers can chat face to face via their mobile device.

Please reach out to us to enable your text messaging services today.

About LendAPI

LendAPI is a comprehensive loan-core that helps banks, credit unions, fintechs and retailers to launch any financial products instantly. Request a demo at lendapi.com. Please follow us on Linkedin.