Abrigo client Millennium Bank in Ooltewah, Tenn., was featured recently in American Banker for its use of technology to increase lending without hiring more lenders.
“Many small banks that lack the resources to hire more lenders have made similar investments in recent years in an effort to compete with not just banks, but also nonbank, online lenders,” American Banker reporter Bryan Yurcan wrote in the article. “As a result, they can fund loans within hours or even minutes.”
Millennium Bank told American Banker that using a suite of products from Abrigo has enabled the bank to improve the consistency and efficiency of its loan analysis, leading to faster loan decision-making. That means its lenders can now answer small loan requests in seconds, freeing them up to work on the more complex loan requests.
Millennium Bank Credit Officer John Hatfield said faster lending decisions yielded by the bank’s new lending process have given it a competitive edge. “As a small community bank in a town that has a lot of regional banks, because we are not always the price leader on rates, we have to find other ways to compete,” Hatfield was quoted as saying. “And I think one of the biggest ways we compete is our speed to market, getting an answer back quickly.”
Since investing in the improvements to the lending and underwriting processes, Millennium has increased loan production by 25 percent without bringing on extra staff, according to the article. And loan volume has increased in the last two years by more than 50 percent, to nearly $125 million at the end of 2017.
“The loan growth has been a boon to the bank’s bottom line as well,” American Banker noted. “Millennium earned $2.4 million in 2017, up 64% from two years earlier and 120% from the end of 2014, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data.”
Executives at Millennium Bank have previously said that some of the most effective of Abrigo's features being utilized by the institution are Credit Memo and the Electronic Tax Return Reader (ETRR). The automated Credit Memo feature paved the way for a consistent credit memo across the bank, and ETRR automatically inputs all of the fields from digital tax returns into the Abrigo system, eliminating the need to key in information from tax returns.
See the entire American Banker article here.
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