The lending industry has greatly increased public access to financial services. However, this achievement has not come without the help of technology. Mobile lending specialists are always on the go and on the road for their clients, and, accordingly, mobile lending specialists need to bring their office with them. Idle time between meetings or time spent waiting for clients must be utilized, wherever the mobile lending specialist happens to be.

To address this feature of the industry, financial institutions that have third party lending programs provide their agents with a suite of technology. This technology almost always includes a mobile application. In this article, we detail key features that such a mobile app must include in order to maximize the productivity of a financial institution’s mobile lending team:

1.      Lending calculator

The primary goal of a mobile lending specialists is, of course, to lend. A useful mobile app must have a robust lending calculator that can provide pricing for terms and input for custom variables, such as variable down payments, term lengths, and interest rates. More sophisticated lending calculators can also verify a borrower’s credit history and include this variable in the calculations. It is additionally useful if this calculator can quickly send potential borrowers the terms of this quote in an easy-to-interpret PDF. Another useful feature is for the mobile app to list the real-time competitive landscape for similar offers from competing institutions.

2.      Marketing support

The initial client meeting is only the first step of the lending journey. Of course, if mobile lending specialists could only take the first client meeting, very few deals would ever be closed. Accordingly, the best mobile apps for mobile lending specialists include a rich feature set for marketing support. To begin, this includes a library of informative and beautiful marketing collateral that can be shared on a tablet or forwarded to a client during the initial meeting. Then, for after the meeting, an app must have a multi-functional customer relationship management system. This system must allow the specialist to easily keep track of their borrowers at every stage of the pipeline. This tracking must include not only contact information but also information on each borrower’s personal lending preferences and needs. Additionally, agents should be able to reach out to their prospective borrowers directly in-app with one-tap email and text follow up.

3.      Closing tools

Once the customer is ready to close the deal and accept the loan, ideal mobile lending apps remove much of the friction in the loan closing process. Such features include mobile document sharing and esignature capabilities, which allow the lender to close the loan from anywhere. With mobile document sharing, documents can be reviewed at each client’s location via a mobile tablet. If the client agrees to these terms, they can quickly sign the document electronically. Copies of these documents are then sent via email to the borrowers, and the documents are securely delivered to the financial institution’s back-end system via API. With a proper app, mobile lending specialists and borrowers no longer need to deal with paper, scanning, or filing important closing documents. Everything can be executed quickly and efficiently via the mobile lending specialist’s device.

The Future

A financial institution’s app for mobile lending specialists must make the lender’s job as easy as possible and, consequently, must make the borrower’s experience as smooth and as painless as possible. Above are a few important areas and features in which a successful app for mobile lending specialists must excel. Looking towards the future, a feature that few apps for mobile lending specialists include today is mobile video. This feature has been prohibited in the past due limitations in mobile data bandwidth, however these limitations are quickly being overcome by 4G and LTE connectivity. Incorporating mobile video within the mobile app will allow mobile lending specialists to quickly and securely keep in contact with their customers in a more personable way at every step of the borrowing process.