KETCHIKAN, Alaska -
Like other small business lenders, Tongass-which makes member business loans to charter boat captains, among others-wanted to be able to make quick, compliant loans to just about any qualified borrower.
"We can provide for some odd entities," explained Helen Mickel, operations and loan manager at Tongass FCU. "I can tailor the loan to meet the member's needs, to where I can do anything from an SBA loan to a preferred marine mortgage with irregular payments.
"There also are a lot of wonderful options within the business loan agreement," she continued. The software allows for key-person insurance, shareholder compensation limits and a flexible statement schedule, for example.
Tongass uses the LaserPro solution, part of the ProSuite platform offered by Harland Financial Solutions of Portland, Ore.
"It's really nice to be able to bounce around between loan types," agreed Brett Carnahan, commercial lending officer at Warren, Ohio-based Seven Seventeen CU, which also uses LaserPro. The two-person commercial loan department at the $720-milion CU lends to diverse borrowers such as family limited partnerships, he said.
"We don't process the same types of loans every week, so LaserPro gives us the confidence to put a good set of closing documents together," Carnahan said.
"If you're trying to please the examiners, LaserPro will do it," Mickel continued, who has worked in business lending for financial institutions for 15 years. "We're not going to end up in court because we messed up something in the documentation."
"We can skip passing the opportunity on to a commercial bank," Carnahan added.
Screen by screen, LaserPro helps loan officers select necessary loan documents depending on the loan type, whether the loan is secured and whether the loan has irregular payments or a business loan agreement, said Warren Cole, a senior lending consultant in consulting services at Harland.
Automated warnings alert loan officers when necessary information is missing, added Carnahan. "That reduces the risk of having someone sign a set of loan papers that isn't properly worded."
"The system is designed to provide that succession of guidance to tailor the documents to the circumstances of the loan," said Cole. "That leads to the magical place: an opportunity for credit unions to embed policies for standard products but still have flexibility for some of the unusual circumstances that commercial lending presents."
Seven Seventeen can prepare loan documents that are compliant with all federal and state regulations in 15 to 45 minutes, depending on the loan, Carnahan said. "LaserPro really helps us to turn around loans as quickly as any other financial institution in our shrinking and overbanked market."
The nimble approach will help the CU "eclipse $20-million in member business loans this year," up from $1.2-million in 2001, he said.
Both credit unions turned to LaserPro from attorney-based documentation processes.
"We had been working with an attorney, which was time-consuming and not all that cheap," Carnahan said. "We would hand off the terms and the parameters to the attorney, who would prepare a rough draft of the documents. We'd review those and send them back with corrections.
"We ran that way for a few months, but we knew if we wanted to book any volume and keep the fees down, we had to take next step and made the easy choice of using LaserPro."
more
Read more about small business lending technologies and trends at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
* Banks Turning To Small Biz Lending, for a story on the recent surge in the small business lending market.
* Solution To Scoring Biz Loans, for a story on easing risk in making small business loans at GTE FCU.
* Lessons Learned In Integrating Business Members, for a story on how Fairwinds CU struggled before it successfully integrated business and personal accounts.
more info on this story
* Tongass FCU, www.tongassfcu.com
* Seven Seventeen CU, www.sscu.net
* Harland Financial Solutions, www.harlandfinancialsolutions.com
