Mobile Lending Is Changing the Way Credit Unions Do Business
Credit union members are no longer satisfied with simply being able to check their account balances and transfer money online. Today, with 50 percent of U.S. consumers owning a smartphone (Neilson Mobile Insights, March 29, 2012), credit unions are expected to provide lending services through their member’s preferred channel, and for a whole new generation, that channel is mobile.
While most credit unions have online loan applications, many have not yet customized them for the mobile channel (both phone and tablet), which makes completing a loan application on a smartphone cumbersome. That’s why CUNA Mutual Group launched SmartPhone Loans almost two years ago to be the mobile solution to its online lending platform, loanliner.com. Since launch, mobile applications have increased steadily and now account for more than 12 percent of total loanliner.com applications, translating to more than a half a billion dollars in loan applications by the end of 2012.
“The mobile channel is growing dramatically,” said Steve Hoke, director of loan growth products at CUNA Mutual Group. “Credit unions that ignore it do so at their peril. Not only does the SmartPhone Loan technology help credit unions grow loans through higher completion rates, but it also makes it easier for members to express interest in payment protection as part of the application process. We find that members do so roughly 50 percent of the time, making it much easier for lenders to include payment protection on the loan at closing time.”
SmartPhone Loans is a web-based solution that allows CUNA Mutual Group to make compliance updates without any distribution or maintenance challenges. Loanliner.com detects the incoming browser and reformats the screen to display all the required disclosures on that particular device. SmartPhone Loans interfaces with more than 90 percent of the loan origination systems serving credit unions and has the ability to use the automated underwriting engine within the loan origination system to deliver a real-time credit underwriting decision to the member.
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