Release Notes v.7.8 – Streamlining Communication and Document Management for Lender’s Staff and Borrowers  

We’ve had an incredibly productive year rolling out a number of significant releases with a long list of features which were requested by our clients and therefore were instantly adopted and actively used. To wrap up 2021 and start the new product year on a strong note, we’re happy to announce the release of TurnKey Lender v.7.8.

In the final release of 2021, meet:

• A reimagined approach to loan and borrower document’s management which will become a definitive answer to all the common challenges lenders of different sizes face when collecting, accessing, analyzing, storing, and archiving documents from borrowers at scale.

• Notification center with all the important information for both the staff and the borrower at a glance.

• Easy-to-use back-office users’ notifications called to ensure quicker turnaround and optimal experience for the borrower.

• And much more.

Without further ado, let’s dig in.

Communication improvements and updates 

Sending custom messages to borrowers

It’s important for lenders to have the ability to send notifications/emails in manual mode, not just automatic messages triggered by certain events. That is why now, in all workplaces there are full-fledged email and SMS message managers.  

We’re often asked to implement more CRM functionality into our lending automation software. And we’re happy to report that we’re moving in that direction and have been for some time. So in this release, we’re happy to roll out the long-awaited ability to craft and send custom messages to borrowers right from the staff’s workplaces.  

By allowing staff members to message borrowers directly, we save employees’ time and remove unnecessary steps as you don’t have to go to a different mail system to communicate with the client.

This is another functionality set that will save time and streamline overall lending business workflows by keeping more of the work inside the TurnKey Lender instead of switching between the solutions.

If needed, the system pulls notification templates created by the administrator in Settings – Notifications. They will show up at any workplace with all the needed formatting, branding, subject, and body elements, etc so an employee could put together a sophisticated message without the extra effort.

As with all notifications, these custom messages support all of our merge fields and file attachment options.
You can see all the messages sent to the borrower over time from the Contact tab.

Logging contacts with the borrower

In case the client has responded to your email or you have communicated with them outside of Turnkey Lender in any other manner, you can collect and store all the info that you exchanged with a borrower in their application to make sure all the data is stored methodically at the same place.

Back-office user notifications

Notifications for employees – you’ve asked for it and we’ve delivered.

Your staff will enjoy receiving important data in a faster and more focused manner with impeccable communication order and loan management simplicity which is especially appreciated by lenders with a big team.

Now, an employee can react to new loans and situations that require their input in the day-to-day work a lot faster.

There’s an enormous amount of data TurnKey Lender learns to analyze and process better with each release and with personalized back-office user notifications infrastructure in place, we’ll be able to share more actionable insights and helpful hints than ever.

Starting with v.7.8, TurnKey Lender is capable of meaningful back-office users notification which is a big and impactful change to the way lenders use our software. From now on, anything urgent happens, you can expect the employee to receive a dashboard, SMS, or email notification.

For example, there’s an unassigned loan and all the people who have access to it, are notified so they can start working on it as soon as possible.

Same as with borrower notifications, those sent to employees are triggered by a list of events that occur to different staff members in a lending business. As the administrator, you can enable/disable the sending of any email/SMS/dashboard notification as well as fully edit its contents.

With this new functionality, managers don’t have to spend all their time monitoring the system as it will notify them whenever something important and relevant to them happens.

Discuss loan or leave your note in comments

For a lending business to function, it’s often required to have input from different employees. And while we can’t install a watercooler in the middle of TurnKey Lender software for you to discuss something with a colleague, we’ve got something even better – a live comment board.

Every loan application in all the workplaces will now have an internal comment board where staff can discuss details of this loan, exchange documents, attach internal information, etc. And on top of that, if you’re mentioned in a comment board you’ll get notified that your colleague needs you and be able to access to the application with one click.

Notification center

This is one of those features that we’ve thoroughly enjoyed creating because of how useful it’ll be to lenders and their borrowers. With v.7.8 we’re presenting a brand-new notification center which can be found in the top menu of TurnKey Lender.  

In addition to email and SMS notifications, there is now a third option – dashboard center notifications and you can manage them the same way you do messages for other channels.

Both the borrower and the back-office user will have an instant way to see the notification they’ve just received as well as the notifications archive from their workplace or borrower portal. This will allow for faster communication with client, help instantly notify and educate them about the changes to their loan, as well as any other SaaS communication scenario.

These notifications can be shown to all the system users but every one user only receives the notifications that apply to their role in the company or their particular functions.

Documents management – a completely new approach that scales

Documents management logic has been fully reimagined in v.7.8. The goal of the new design and approach, in general, is to provide document management freedom that would better scale with organizations and provide an easy-to-use long-term solution for our infrastructure to rely on.

From now on, administrators are able to create detailed requirements for borrower and loan documents collection which will be instantly reflected on the loan application form as well as inside the system workplaces and the borrower portal.

You can add an unlimited number of documents which in the system will be either collected to a borrower throughout the system or to their specific loans.

Documents’ management module overview

Let’s go over some options for the document management module. As stated before, you can add new documents to collect on the level of the borrower or on the level of specific loans. With that, you have unlimited flexibility when it comes to the criteria for the documents.

• Give a title and a description for this type of documents so the borrower and the staff know what document is attached or has to be attached in which section. This text displays in the workplaces and the borrower portal to identify the attached documents.

• Number of files – specify how many files you expect to receive for this document type from a borrower.

• There’s an option to collect separate internal documents. Check “Internal” and only Back-office users will be able to attach and see this kind of documents and they will be used by the staff for their work and decisioning.

• If a document isn’t internal, you can select an option to collect the document while borrowers apply for the loan and make the attachment required for successful application.

• Verification – this check means that every uploaded doc requires verification by a back-office user. They will have to open the doc and verify that it meets their requirements or is accurate. Once verified, borrower won’t be able to delete the document from the borrower portal.

• Expiration period – you can select how long a document remain acceptable for you. Expiration period starts as soon as the document is uploaded or verified. Once expired, the document will be moved to the trash. There admin users can find all the documents that were once attached to the borrower to check any historical data.

• Custom file types – select whether you’d like to allow all document formats for this document type, or, for example, just pdfs.

• Max upload file size – by default we limit file upload size to 5MB. But you can set a lower limit that suits you better.

Documents are collected during a new step of loan application

As soon as you create documents to collect during the application process, a new step will appear for each new loan application where the borrower will be asked to provide the documents required by the staff.

Documents management on the front-end

All of the above can be found on each loan application both in the borrower portal for the end-users and in the System workplaces for employees. All the changes and actions on the documents are tracked and logged so you can always find what happened at any given point of time.

Payments improvements 

Batch disbursement 

In v.7.8 we’re introducing a way to  disburse multiple loans with a single click. 

If the payment provider is connected and there are multiple loans assigned to you in the Servicing workplace, you can select as many loan applications as you need and disburse all of them in a batch. So instead of going through each application in the Servicing workplace awaiting disbursement, you can process them all.

Disbursement can be made only if the borrower has relevant bank details. You will see if any of the applications lack details to participate in batch disbursement. Once the batch disbursement is completed, you will see a screen informing you about the payments that were made and if any errors were encountered along the way.

Displaying actual payment method

Now admin-level back-office users have a dedicated block in the loan application with the clients’ payment details to see where money have been transferred to. This is necessary to instantly see which of the many possible payment details were used.

Vendor management improvement

In addition to ongoing design and functional maintenance, a notable update to the Vendors workplace is that from now on you can add multiple bank accounts to vendor profiles allowing their managers more freedom in working with the retailer/lender.

Flinks integration updates 

We’ve added a new credit scorecard for Flinks which relies on the unique data points we can get from the Flinks reports our system collects. Before, Flinks only worked in Canada as a provider of bank account verification and bank statement scoring data. Now Flinks has started working in the US and we’ve updated our integration to provide lenders in the US with the best possible scoring data as well.

A new set of business rules specific to the US and a bunch of new decision rules were added to achieve deepest possible analysis of the borrower’s financials, their behavior, and likelihood of loan repayment.

The underwriter now instantly receives unique data points we’re able to decode from the report we get from Flinks with hundreds of attributes that allow us to analyze the financial well-being of the client and make an efficient loan decision faster.

Migration tools improvements 

We’ve also added a few new options for cases when new customers and their data need to be imported into TurnKey Lender. From now on, you can add customer bank details, custom loan IDs, and equal payment sizes for borrowers within import. The Excel template generated for imports will already include the rows for this new data. This saves a lot of time on customer management in cases when you import hundreds or even thousands of loans and borrowers into the system.

Final thoughts 

That’s all we have for you in TurnKey Lender v.7.8 and in 2021 but we guarantee that what we’re working on now will be as or even more important for lenders and borrowers worldwide.

You can read up on our other releases of 2021 here

• TurnKey Lender v.7.4 – Making Retail Finance & Digital Lending Even Easier

• TurnKey Lender v.7.5: Risk Scoring, Credit Lines, P2P Investments’ Management, Batch Data Import, and More

• TurnKey Lender v.7.6 – Making Business Lending Made Available Out-of-the-Box

• TurnKey Lender v.7.7 – End-to-End Lending Automation Easier Than Ever