Why Lending Organizations Are Splitting Into Two AI Camps
Why Lending Organizations Are Splitting Into Two AI Camps I keep having the same conversation with lending executives, and I think it deserves a direct article because of how stark the divide has become. I am not talking about a divide between organizations that are...
Why Lean Lending Organizations Need an Implementation Partner
Why Lean Lending Organizations Need an Implementation Partner I have had a version of the same conversation with enough CDFI executives and community lending leaders that I no longer think of it as an anecdote. It is a pattern. Someone who has just come through a...
Why Over Customizing Loan Origination Software Backfires
Why Over-Customizing Loan Origination Software Backfires I have spent a lot of time in the offices of specialty lenders, CDFIs, and commercial finance companies over the past several years, usually a year or two after they went live on a new loan origination or...
Where AI Should and Shouldn t Make Lending Decisions
Where AI Should and Shouldn't Make Lending Decisions I have spent the last several months working on a book about artificial intelligence in lending, and one question keeps surfacing in almost every conversation I have with COOs, Heads of Lending, and digital...
How Workflow Automation Simplifies Alternative Lending
How Workflow Automation Simplifies Alternative Lending I have sat in enough operations rooms with MCA funders and alternative lenders over the past few years to notice a pattern. It shows up almost the same way every time. A lender implements a configurable lending...
Why Lenders Don t Know What They Need Until Go Live
Why Lenders Don't Know What They Need Until Go-LiveSomething comes up in almost every conversation I have with lending organizations that have been live on a platform for six months or more. It is some version of the same honest reflection. They could not have told...
Why MCA Lenders Outgrow Their Origination Platform Faster Than They Expect
Why MCA Lenders Outgrow Their Origination Platform Faster Than They ExpectI have sat in enough operations reviews with merchant cash advance and alternative lending teams to recognize a pattern that shows up almost every time a company scales past its early stage. The...
Why CDFI Policy Momentum Means Lenders Must Scale Now
Why CDFI Policy Momentum Means Lenders Must Scale Now I have spent a lot of time this year in rooms with CDFI leaders, and I keep hearing the same mix of optimism and anxiety. The optimism comes from Washington. The anxiety comes from their own back office. Both...
How Regulated Lenders Are Building AI Governance First
How Regulated Lenders Are Building AI Governance First I have spent a lot of time over the past year in conversations with operations leaders at CDFIs, impact investment funds, and specialty finance companies with SEC oversight, and a pattern has emerged that I think...
Why AI Document Extraction Is Outperforming OCR in Lending
Why AI Document Extraction Is Outperforming OCR in Lending A pattern I keep seeing in conversations with lending operations teams that have been using AI for document extraction for a year or more is that the accuracy story has changed significantly. And the change is...
How AI Portfolio Monitoring Catches Loan Risk Earlier
How AI Portfolio Monitoring Catches Loan Risk Earlier A pattern I keep coming back to in conversations with portfolio managers at specialty lenders and affordable housing finance companies is how reactive most portfolio monitoring actually is in practice. Everyone...
The Hidden Gap in Loan Portfolio Aging Reports
The Hidden Gap in Loan Portfolio Aging Reports There is a question I have started asking every lending operations team I talk to during a software evaluation, because the answer tells me more about what their reconciliation workload will actually look like than any...
Why Loan Servicing Software Trust Breaks Down After Go Live
Why Loan Servicing Software Trust Breaks Down After Go-Live I have sat in enough post-go-live reviews now to recognize a pattern that most lenders do not see coming, even though it happens almost every time. It is not the failure of a big feature. It is not a system...
Why Software Evaluations Fail Before the First Demo
Why Software Evaluations Fail Before the First DemoI have sat in enough rooms with COOs, Heads of Lending, and Digital Transformation leaders to notice a pattern that keeps repeating itself across the CDFI and community lending space. It came up again recently in a...
Why Modernizing Lending Operations Is a People Problem
Why Modernizing Lending Operations Is a People Problem Something comes up in almost every conversation I have with community lending teams that have recently gone live on a modern platform. It is a version of the same observation, repeated in different words by...
Why CDFI Reporting to Multiple Funders Is So Hard
Why CDFI Reporting to Multiple Funders Is So Hard I have spent a lot of time in the offices of Community Development Financial Institutions over the past several years, and there is one operational burden that comes up in almost every conversation but rarely gets...
What CDFI Leaders Should Expect From a Lending Platform Rollout
What CDFI Leaders Should Expect From a Lending Platform Rollout There is a conversation I have had with enough CDFI leaders now that I can predict how it will go before it starts. It happens after the implementation is done, usually six months or a year into using...
The Hidden Portfolio Risk in Spreadsheet Based Lending
The Hidden Portfolio Risk in Spreadsheet-Based Lending I have sat in enough conversations with COOs and Heads of Lending at community lending organizations to notice a pattern that most executive teams have not fully priced into their risk models. It shows up almost...