Suntell was borne out of my frustration as a commercial lender. Frustration in the labor intensiveness of every single step in the collection and analyzing of financial data and the servicing of my assigned portfolio of loans for renewals, past due payments and collections of problem loans. There was a checklist for everything and the data needed to complete all of the forms and checklists was spread between the core and the various ‘stand alone’ software programs that might have been used at the time.
This was frustrating to me. Was I a banker, or an expensive paper pusher? It caused me pause, to the point that I left banking to set out and solve this problem. Suntell was formed with a vision of eliminating as many of the checklists and forms as possible along with centralizing data that mirrored the core customer and loan data on a daily basis.
The early version was called LMS, which stands for Loan Management System. It continues to be LMS and is now part of our Square 1 Credit Suite ®. The Square 1 Credit Suite now contains both LMS and SDI (Suntell Document Imaging). As a customer of the Square 1 Credit Suite, you have in your possession a single system that eases the pain that I suffered in the 80’s and 90’s. By integrating all commercial and agricultural credit underwriting, credit presentations, loan booking, document tracking, document imaging, loan pipeline management, past due loans and watch list loan management into a single data system refreshed with customer, loan, and deposit balances daily form the core, workflow efficiency and ROI can be achieved and lender and operations frustration minimized.
It’s 2015 and we continue to talk daily to financial institutions that underwrite and service their commercial and agricultural loan portfolios as though they are trapped in world I experienced in the 80’s or 90’s. Some of the most progressive tech and IT driven financial institutions in the market, with all of the bells and whistles to service and attract new customers, continue to allow their internal commercial loan management systems to languish in the world of paper and pencil or Excel and Word documents along with paper credit files. The very area that drives most of the income and net earnings of most financial institutions is treated like a poor stepchild when it comes to current technology. We continue our mission to bring workflow efficiency to commercial and agricultural lending. However, our vision for our product is not complete.
With that background and buildup, I am truly more excited about our next release this month – Version 18.3 – than many of our previous versions. For me personally, this version of LMS in our Square 1 Credit Suite will help complete the original vision of Suntell. While this version contains a number of existing product enhancements and new features such as commercial Rent Rolls analysis, my excitement is for the all new ‘Dashboards’ in Version 18.3.
This version will bring workflow efficiency to a whole new level for our current customers. Having all of the data updated and contained in a single system was just part of the original vision. Pushing that data to the assigned officer or user daily for those tasks that need attention helps complete the vision for workflow efficiency. Imagine having a system that when you log on in the morning, will tell you in what stage of the pipeline that your new or renewal loans are positioned, what document exceptions need attention, or what past due loans or watch list loans need updated action plans or follow up. Rather than having to retrieve that data from the system, only the relevant information that you define in the initial configuration and set up process is pushed out automatically to the end user.
Other systems in the marketplace advertise dashboards but their dashboards are typically limited to graphs and tables of various segments of the loan portfolio. While those can be helpful or useful at a macro level, our Dashboards focus is on the push of relevant data and tasks to each assigned user or officer.
If you missed our recent regional training in Nashville, TN, in which Version 18.3 was revealed, please do not hesitate to contact your Suntell customer representative to discuss how you can fully harness or utilize Dashboards to more fully improve the lending workflow efficiency contained in the Square 1 Credit Suite.
Thank you for your business and continued support.
Duane Lankard
CEO, Suntell
