Published on 4/5/2022
Looking for an IAV software? Avoid these 5 mistakes!
5. Avoid getting locked into a lengthy contract with monthly minimums.
Contracts can cost you big in the long run, and the upfront cost for some providers can be pretty painful too. If you are just starting out, you may think a giant provider with hundreds of bells and whistles is what you need, and maybe you do. The problem is if you get a few months in and realize that you don’t actually use all those dazzling features, or worse, your volume isn’t what you were expecting from the get-go. Now you are stuck paying for a service you can’t or don’t use and you are unable get out of those obligations. Switching to another provider, even one that costs less, will still end up costing more until the previous provider’s contract expires. That’s a lot of wasted overhead that could have been spent on pretty much anything else.
This is the unspoken dark side of finding vendors in the lending industry. Find a digital bank statement provider with no minimums, or see if you can redline in a clause allowing you to bail out within the first 90 days. This way you can cut your losses if you realize early on this may not be the right vendor for you. And maybe they will be the right vendor for you in 5 years, which will be great for your future business. However, you need the right vendor for your business now, and if that vendor can also scale with you, so much the better. Keep in mind your current minimum underwriting needs, and budget when making your selection. With a good IAV partner, you should be able to add products and features as you grow or have the flexibility to move on should you scale outside their ability to accommodate you (we should all be so lucky!).
If you can’t avoid a contract, make sure you read it and are aware of every clause and, if possible, have the wiggle room financially to make a change. Every lender is different and there is no one-size-fits-all in account verification software. Once they tie you into a contract, they have your money and there is no reason for them to engage further. Which brings me to number 4.
4. Don’t pay extra for support.
You, your team, and your customers deserve world-class support without it costing you an arm and a leg. How will you know when and where to use the new software? How will you figure out what features are the most beneficial and how to integrate them into your process? How are you going to train all of your teams, some of whom may be in different locations and in different time zones? Plus, you can’t take the whole company offline to get everyone trained. And if you hire a new person, you’ll need to make sure they get up to speed too! Don’t forget troubleshooting for issues, be it technical or tactical.
Your vendor should offer live training to your teams so they are set up for success from day one. They should also offer refresher courses to help maintain a high level of platform knowledge and ongoing training for new hires. Because who better to train on a product then the vendor themselves?
IAV vendors must also offer technical support for your development team to get your integration up and running. And not just until your go live date. Anyone who works in tech knows that it’s an ongoing maintenance process, so ongoing support for your developers is not a bonus, it’s a requirement.
Your clients cannot be overlooked either. What does your IAV provider offer in terms of borrower education or assistance? Will they help your customers step through the process should they get stuck? Do they have any steps in place to protect the borrowers’ rights? After all, you are asking them to hand over their banking details, which can pretty scary for some people. You want to have the peace of mind knowing that your customer’s delicate information will be handled with the utmost care and security, exactly as you would handle it.
This should all be free, that’s non-negotiable. Why would you pay a vendor to get help using THEIR product? Don’t they want you to use their product successfully? Support also needs to be accessible. There is nothing worse than having a quick question with your only option being to throw it into the dark email abyss and wait for a canned response. You should be able to pick up the phone and talk to a live person if you need to, and bonus points if they offer live chat on the website.
3. Don’t settle for only one data source.
In most cases, if your data provider goes down, so do you. Don’t hurt your lending potential with no data provider back up plan. If your current digital bank statement partner does not have multiple sources for data aggregation, you have a couple options. 1) You can consider moving to one that does or 2) incur the added expense of adding a backup provider. Obviously, no one wants to pay for two vendors that do the same thing, however, it will cost you less than the price of losing clients if you lose service completely. The easy answer is to find an IAV software that already encompasses more than one data source, doing the work for you and saving you both headache and budget.
2. Don’t struggle through long, complicated onboarding processes.
The longer it takes to get up and going, the more revenue goes to your competitors. There are few things more frustrating than having everything in place to start lending only to have to wait weeks to get your instant account verification software up and running. In a time where we can have practically anything in a matter of minutes, why does most onboarding take so long? Granted, maybe you have an extremely complicated system you are trying to add this new vendor to, but in those cases, you should still have a manual option to use as a work around day one. This can also be a life saver should your automated system go down for any reason.
And the number one mistake…
1. Settling for anything less than DecisionLogic.
I will admit we are partial to our own awesomeness, but there is a reason we are considered the industry gold standard. No contracts, no minimums, free support for every customer regardless of level of commitment, multiple data providers, and same-day onboarding. What else could you ask for? We have set the bar extremely high for IAV services, and we think you should too.
