Digital transformation in financial services: how TurnKey Lender automates the lending process & changes the lending landscape

Bot Girl here! I’m so excited to dive into the world of financial services with you. It comes as no surprise that loan processing and the future of financial services is digital. But what does that mean for you and me?

I sat down with Elena Ionenko, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of TurnKey Lender, to learn more about what it means to be forward-thinking in financial services, specifically as it relates to lending.

First, a little about TurnKey Lender:

TurnKey Lender provides an intelligent solution for businesses ranging from lending companies, banks, and credit unions to alternative lenders, healthcare companies, and retailers. TurnKey’s solution helps businesses make better decisions and reduce risks with new tech for credit scoring and borrower evaluation. Their solution uses artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep neural networks) to help improve, digitize, and automate every aspect of the lending process. Analyzing a customer’s credit score and history is only one small part of what TurnKey Lender brings to the table. The company’s key offering is its end-to-end lending platform that automates every step of the crediting process. The system is flexible enough to address the specific needs of different businesses and can be deployed within days, whereas creating a similar solution in-house would cost millions and take years to develop.

TurnKey Lender has also partnered with vital online application providers to offer integrations with payment providers, data sources, CRMs, and e-signature solutions. This is where we come in!

You know I love learning about new technology and am passionate about automation. So, I jumped at the opportunity to learn more about AI from Elena and how it helps TurnKey Lender differentiate themselves from other companies.

Let’s jump right into my discussion with Elena from TurnKey Lender.

As a lender, you’re always looking at global economic trends. The same way the crisis of 2008 brought us modern e-commerce, the crisis of 2020 will transform e-lending. Borrowers have grown tired of operating under the traditional methods for banking and lending because these methods are stuck in the past and don’t take into account new approaches for credit scoring due to the complexity of their legacy solutions. To be forward-thinking in financial services is to realize that things won’t be going back to the way they used to be and thus embrace the new wave of technology that is standing by and ready to help.

Did you know that it still takes several weeks for many traditional lenders to approve a loan? For corporate loans, it may take much longer than that. And even then, the interest rate offered won’t be a fair one, often due to inflated staff and outdated scoring approaches. To the vast majority of people and businesses, this is simply unacceptable because they can’t afford it.

The demand for affordable, accessible, fair, and easy-to-use credit is too big to ignore. And why would you? FinTech providers such as TurnKey Lender are competing to provide businesses with the most user-friendly, intelligent, and affordable automation for financial services possible. This is further simplified by meaningful partnerships (like the one we have with signNow) that help make sure all the automation needs of a business can be addressed with the turn of a key in a single platform.

TurnKey Lender mainly uses machine learning and deep neural networks for credit decision-making and risk evaluation. Back in 2015, we put together a team of PhDs and AI experts that carried out machine learning and scoring projects for companies such as Boeing, LG, Bank of America, and Stanford University in the past.

To achieve an unmatched level of accuracy for credit decision-making, TurnKey combined deep neural networks with self-learning scoring models based on both traditional and alternative evaluation approaches and data sources. When working with a client’s data, the system uses prediction, classification, clustering, and association to process loan applications.

For safety purposes, the system doesn’t just use the data a client provides but also pulls any available information from the sources it’s synchronized with (such as credit bureaus, bank statement providers, a borrower’s smartphone, or social media). All the data is processed by TurnKey Lender’s Intelligent Decision Engine and is then presented in the form of a risk evaluation.

All in all, risk assessment, borrower evaluation, and credit score decision-making take our solution as little as 30 seconds to reach a conclusion. To draw a comparison, as I was saying, most traditional lenders can take up to 9 business days to complete this process.

No other solution on the market automates lending to this extent. What’s more, no other provider makes it this easy to begin crediting your clients while making money doing so. And this is only possible thanks to our focus on the meaningful use of AI and Big Data in our solutions.

What does embedded lending mean?

Embedded lending means that any business can start offering accessible and affordable financing to their clients without involving a middleman in the form of a bank or spending a fortune on creating a complex in-house solution. With a solution like ours, you can put lending on autopilot by letting the system manage processing, disbursement, and collection of funds for your goods and services.

So right now, anyone from an e-commerce store or auto dealer, to a bank, healthcare provider, or a payday lender, can launch their own digital lending operation. And what’s more, they can start offering affordable and profitable credit services in a matter of days for a fraction of the price it would cost them in the past. But what’s most important, lending is a complex process, and now you don’t have to focus all your time and resources on it as the System does all the heavy lifting for you.

With embedded lending, crediting doesn’t have to be your key product. You don’t even need to charge interest if you just want to offer your clients the option of paying installments. You simply make it a part of your business which improves your standing with clients and helps you reach new customer segments.

Digital lending used to be the sole prerogative of enterprise-level financial institutions that could afford larger staffs, maintained enormous budgets, and had a foothold in every city via a system of local branches. The barriers for entry to the lending industry were very high, this negated the possibility of any real competition entering the market. The crisis of 2008 highlighted how flawed the banking and lending system was, so from that moment on, TurnKey Lender’s goal was to make fair lending a worldwide reality both for the lender and the borrower. And we do that successfully by providing our clients with the most intelligent, accessible, affordable, and easy-to-use solutions on the market.

The lending process may have become simpler from the standpoint of the customer, but only if their bank was utilizing intelligent digital technology to offer online and mobile services before the Corona crisis hit.

At the same time, for the financial institutions that haven’t yet modernized their technology, the existing difficulties for lending were amplified, making the process even more difficult, if not impossible. With the ongoing economic crisis and multiple deferral programs taking place, lenders who used to rely on manual processes and traditional credit risk assessment can no longer identify and appeal to their target audience. For many of them, instead of finding and implementing new methods for processing applications and evaluating borrowers, they’ve simply decided to pull back and double down on their outdated methods. That’s why the current rates of approval for consumer loans have dramatically fallen in the second quarter of 2020.

There’s no doubt that digital lending is taking over as the new normal simply because it’s the next evolutionary step for the industry. Financial institutions will just have to adapt if they’re intent on staying in business.

You will know it as soon as you visit your bank’s website. Do they offer online banking? Can you apply for a loan through their mobile app? The social distancing trend isn’t going away, that’s why offering these types of services are becoming more mandatory. Not to mention, traditional approaches to crediting are too rigid to adapt to the current economic reality. This means that there’s really no way to get fair evaluation and loan terms during the current economic climate unless your lender is using intelligent credit scoring.

As for your second question, the physical banking branches are either closed or working limited hours, and borrowers are getting used to accessible and affordable credit products. So, the ability to conduct all financial operations remotely, quickly, and intelligently is a matter of survival for banks in 2020.

Wrapping up:

Wow! As you can see, TurnKey Lender is at the forefront of new technologies for lending and banking.

signNow is thrilled to be partnering with TurnKey by offering an e-signature integration that allows customers to streamline their digital document management and e-signature document workflows for banks and their borrowers.

We’d love to hear from you and find out how we can get your #ProblemSolvedwithSignNow!