On Wednesday, November 10th while attending the NACUSO annual conference at the Encore Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Natalie Stavas give a very inspirational message to the Credit Union and Credit Union Service Organization attendees.
Dr. Natalie Stavas, inspirational Boston Marathon hero, humanitarian and award-winning Physician spoke on the topic, "Running Towards Chaos". Dr. Stavas says, "When we're faced with adversity, we really only have two options don't we, we run towards it or we turn and run the other way". She talked about her experience in 2013 as she was finishing her 26 miles of the Boston Marathon when two bombs detonated at the finish line, and instead of turning around and running away with the crowd, she ran towards the chaos and saved 4 lives that day.
Her story was amazing, but I found her message more amazing and inspirational. She taught us through scientific research there is growing evidence that each of us are capable of training ourselves to do difficult and challenging things! "You run towards that which you fear, that which challenges you, that which is oppositional" - Dr. Stavas. That message resonated with me as I sat in that conference room reflecting on the difficult task we have of helping change the industry in how they price and decision all of their loan products using LoanPASS.
Pricing and decision engines have been around for a generation; I grew up within the lending industry using a variety of them and though they do the job they all seem to have similar challenges.
- First, nearly all of them are hard coded to facilitate only a specific type of loan product - pricing consumer loan products, auto loan products, or mortgage loan products to name a few. And even if they say they are configurable, that typically means only within the framework of the products they support.
- Second, these systems are usually very slow to respond with answers because of all the data they need to ingest and calculate.
- And third, most of these engines are built on older technology. Lenders always want to build unique guidelines and pricing for their loan products to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and yet because these older engines were not designed as self-service but rather full-service it requires the Lenders to rely on their pricing and decision engine vendor to manage these changes.
We built LoanPASS to solve all these business challenges for Lenders. LoanPASS is built from the ground up using the latest web technologies, with the idea of being a fully configurable engine that can price and decision any loan product, and engineered for speed with decisions coming back within a second. Oh, and it was designed to be self-administered and maintained, so Lenders can take back control of their loan products and go to market on their own terms instead of their vendors SLA's.
Why I mention all of this is because I think part of the challenge we face here at LoanPASS is helping to educate and retrain a generation of Lenders there is a better way to price and decision loan products today. And as Dr. Stavas taught me that Wednesday morning, we can teach and train ourselves to do difficult things, and I know our team here at LoanPASS is up to the challenge to transforming the lending industry with innovative decisioning solutions.
Happy Holidays!
Michael Lewis