Celent recognizes Santander UK as the winner of the 2020 Celent Model Bank Award for Commercial Lending for their initiative SME, Commercial, and Corporate Lending Digitization and Evolution. Santander UK completely overhauled how its small and medium enterprise (SME), commercial, and corporate lending units do business with over 1,000 internal users impacted. The bank partnered Accenture, nCino, and a wide range of other tech firms to deliver a cutting-edge lending experience for its customers, enabling a faster and more transparent lending experience, greater operational efficiencies, and a swifter lending process.
Benefits for the bank include facilitating a move to a middle office case management model, increasing document team capacity with increased automation, automating covenant calculation and facility monitoring, achieving a single customer view, and implementing a credit risk decision engine to further automate lending decisions and annual reviews. Benefits for customers include an improved customer experience, including faster execution on loan decisions from cutting cycle times, reducing manual effort, and increasing digital flexibility and interactions. Critical to the success of the project was getting employees onboard with dramatically changing operational processes and technology tools from the beginning, and continually proving the value of that change.
Technology firms mentioned in the case study include nCino, Salesforce, Infosys, Quadient, DueDil, Validis, FinSuite BizAnalyzer, Fractal Labs, SpringCM (now DocuSign CLM), DocuSign, Actico, Experian PowerCurve, Dun & Bradstreet, GBG, MicroStrategy, Encompass, Tamr, Finastra Fusion Loan IQ, Alfa, and HPD LendScape.
