Automation Helps Credit Unions Compete for Small Business Loans

Financial services credit unions are often underutilized by businesses looking for commercial loans. Especially small, local businesses, who may benefit from the better rates, flexibility and personalized touch that credit unions are known to provide. 

Cash Flow Mastery: FlashSpread's Dynamic Bank Statements Feature

Financial services credit unions are often underutilized by businesses looking for commercial loans. Especially small, local businesses, who may benefit from the better rates, flexibility and personalized touch that credit unions are known to provide. 

Small businesses were hurt most during the pandemic. Social distancing guidelines, staffing shortages and other logistical hurdles were more easily overcome by large corporations that could afford to restructure operations. Post-pandemic, small businesses are still recovering and many are in need of loans to get back on their feet. 

However, lending to small businesses is generally considered riskier. Small business administration (SBA) loans are therefore more complicated and time-consuming, and government-backed SBA loans are under a lot of regulatory scrutiny, which adds more time and complexity to the process.

Credit unions can enhance their commercial lending capacity by leveraging easy-to-use software automation that scans tax returns and automatically generates side-by-side financial reports to help your specialists quickly determine the financial health of that business. 

It enables your team to overcome the challenges of issuing small business loans quickly and minimizes the man-hours required to not only spread the financial data and perform calculations for debt service coverage ratio (DSCR), etc. but to also service the loan.

Quickly Determine Qualified Loans

Automation can provide many advantages for credit unions, including the ability to quickly and easily evaluate loan applications, decide whether or not to approve loans and manage their portfolios. 

FlashSpread scans and spreads financial information instantly and generates accurate reports on cash flow, balance sheets, income statements, entity cash flow, individual cash flow and global analysis. This significantly reduces the time and effort required by specialists to determine qualified loans, rates, terms and more. 

Automate Compliance With SBA(7) Loans

Issuing safer, government-backed SBA loans takes up to three times as long as a regular commercial loan. This is because complying with government regulations is a chore. Especially since those regulations are subject to change year after year and require special training to understand. It is almost as if the perfect candidate for this position is some kind of robotic bureaucrat. Or, some clever software! 

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FlashSpread’s intelligent APIs automate compliance with government regulations and can enhance your operations for SBA loans.    

Provide More Personalized Service 

The faster your credit union can determine the terms and rates for commercial loans, the happier your business partners will be. Automated financial spreading software helps your team quickly determine viable loans, as well as the rates and terms of those loans by automating the entire process of spreading years worth of financial information. 

The time you save on processing loan applications can be spent on personalizing the service you provide for members. Instead of getting Excel-induced migraines, they can study comprehensive reports and strategize and consider the best option for the business they are servicing. 

Save Big on Servicing Costs

After the loan is issued, it needs to be serviced until it is paid back. This involves spreading the business members financial information again. Instead of having a dedicated servicing team, FlashSpread will also automate this process, even for SBA and other complicated loans. The overhead you save on paying employees to service loans can translate to even better terms and rates for your members. 

FlashSpread Can Harness Credit Unions’ Commercial Lending Potential

Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy. And coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, small businesses are the most in need of financial services that are truly personalized and invested in their goals, community and success. Credit unions can step in to fill this need by enhancing their operations to process and service small business loans quickly and easily. 

FlashSpread can help credit unions save time and money while still providing high-quality services to their business members. By automating your processes, you’ll be able to offer faster processing times and even more competitive rates than your competition. Check out FlashSpread or schedule a demo to see how we can help automate your processes and improve your member experience.