Venture Bank Case Study
About Venture Bank
Venture Bank is 11 years old and has an asset size of 330 million, with 3 locations in Bloomington, Golden Valley, and Eagan, Minnesota. The bank is a business bank first and foremost, with 90% of their customers being small business customers. The bank delivers business lending, including real estate financing, term loans, working capital loans, and letters of credit. The bank utilizes a lot of the SBA programs for their business customer. Every single year, the bank has experienced growth and continues to be profitable. The focus continues to be on business banking, and their biggest mission statement is to proactively bring value to every business relationship through creative, flexible, tailored banking solutions.
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Bank experiences improved portfolio management and efficient reporting with Suntell.
The bank was seeking a way to streamline credit administration and centralize data for credit analysis and ticklers in one database. Suntell provided this functionality, as well as having the nightly import from the bank’s core accounting system. The bank also wanted to move away from documents that were used internally to prepare proposed loans so that presentations to loan committee could be more efficiently prepared. The bank selected Suntell as a vendor in 2010.
I'm impressed with Suntell’s customer service: the phone is always answered immediately or calls are returned quickly. I don’t expect any software to be perfect, but Suntell is responsive to fix issues that we have.
The Implementation Process
Implementation process went smoothly, according to Jeff Bajek, Senior Vice President and Credit Risk Officer. The bank had Suntell perform several conversions of data from existing systems into Suntell, and had no data quality issues. Bajek worked with a team of three people, and structured how the data should look and helped with the mapping. Bajek thought converting data over was easier than he had anticipated once it was completed.
The process of converting to using the system was easiest for Credit Analysts, noted Bajek. Loan Officers and Board of Directors were slower to adapt and more resistant to changes, but the internal team were insistent and knew that they could not go “backwards” to the “old way” of doing things. The internal team wrote procedures for everything: how to manage ticklers and what the expectations were, as well as procedures for Loan Presentation with a half-dozen standardized formats as examples. Now, the system is fully utilized.
The process of converting to using the system was easiest for Credit Analysts, noted Bajek. Loan Officers and Board of Directors were slower to adapt and more resistant to changes, but the internal team were insistent and knew that they could not go “backwards” to the “old way” of doing things. The internal team wrote procedures for everything: how to manage ticklers and what the expectations were, as well as procedures for Loan Presentation with a half-dozen standardized formats as examples. Now, the system is fully utilized.
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Loan Portfolio Management
The bank’s ability to track financial ticklers vastly improved, according to Bajek. The previous system that they used was fairly antiquated, so the data that was converted needed to be cleaned up in order to determine what was required. Now he feels that they have very good system, reporting is done, and they are able to identify which borrowers are delinquent with financials.
The bank also uses reports such as LTV exception reports, past due loan reports, and coming due loan reports. About half a dozen reports that used to be done in Excel are now automated and done through Suntell. The Loan Queue functionality has also been a huge plus for the bank. Internally, they can manage workflow for the credit analysts using the Loan Queue reports and monitor which analysts might be “backed up” and allocate workload appropriately.
Bajek says that he is impressed with Suntell’s customer service: the phone is always answered immediately or calls are returned quickly. “I don’t expect any software to be perfect,” says Bajek, “But Suntell is responsive to fix issues that we have.”
The bank also uses reports such as LTV exception reports, past due loan reports, and coming due loan reports. About half a dozen reports that used to be done in Excel are now automated and done through Suntell. The Loan Queue functionality has also been a huge plus for the bank. Internally, they can manage workflow for the credit analysts using the Loan Queue reports and monitor which analysts might be “backed up” and allocate workload appropriately.
Bajek says that he is impressed with Suntell’s customer service: the phone is always answered immediately or calls are returned quickly. “I don’t expect any software to be perfect,” says Bajek, “But Suntell is responsive to fix issues that we have.”
