Before The Gap was an international clothing brand, it was a small record store in San Francisco’s Lakeside district.

Similarly, tech giants LG got their start selling cosmetics, toothpaste and other personal hygiene products.

That’s right.

LG was originally the Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Company.

There are dozens of stories like these. Businesses grow and evolve over time. And while you might never pivot as dramatically as The Gap or LG, your products and services have and will continue to evolve to meet new market demands.

It goes without saying, but if you shift your offering, expand into new markets, or even grow, your current software may no longer meet your needs. And while it can be tempting to try and adapt existing technology to meet current business requirements, it’s often like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. When assessing the long-term feasibility of your existing loan application processing solution ask the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of maintaining the current system?
2. How much will it cost to make significant changes to meet new business needs?
3. How long does it take to make changes?
4. Is it making you less competitive?
5. Do you rely on the vendor to make key updates?

Over time, keeping your software operating smoothly will cost much more than investing in new technology.

Don’t believe it?

Consider this. Outdated technology cost businesses $1.8 trillion in wasted productivity in 2016.

Is your software making you more, or less, competitive?

Can your current solution:

• Be adapted to new business processes?
• Support a growing number of users?
• Automate repetitive tasks?
• Handle operations on a bigger scale?
• Power a first-class consumer experience?
• Enable business users to make changes quickly?
• Make integration to data sources and other tech solutions easy?

Your credit application processing solution should power not impede business growth and help make you more competitive. If you’re constantly fighting the system to make changes, waiting on integrations due to complex coding, or sacrificing the consumer experience because the system can’t support instant approvals, then it’s time to make a change. Why? Because, if you can’t make changes quickly your business is exposed to increased risk and missed opportunities.

Consumers demand instant decisions and the best user experience. For today’s tech savvy customer making them wait more than a few seconds for a loan decision is like expecting them to go back to the days of dialup internet. While it used to be fine to wait a minute for the internet connection to kick then another minute for a website to respond, it’s now considered slow if a website isn’t visible in just a couple of seconds. If you continue to use the ‘dialup’ of loan application solutions, expect your customers to have found an alternative option before the modem even starts to warble!

Telltale signs your credit/loan application processing system is past its sell-by date include:

• You rely on your dev team to make simple changes
• Making sure it works properly is becoming increasingly expensive
• Waiting on changes is slowing down business growth
• It can’t scale to meet your business needs
• It’s preventing you from making real-time decisions
• Tie-dyed t-shirts, leisure suits, and mullets were acceptable fashion choices when you first started using the software

What should you look for in a replacement?

The benefits of replacing a legacy system far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of implementing a new loan application processing system, but how do you know which replacement solution to select?

Here are five key things to look for in a replacement:

1. A low-code solution – Low-code solutions allow you to configure, maintain and even create new processes without having to rely on your dev team. Instead, you can drag and drop different components to make changes quickly and easily. The right low-code solution can reduce or eliminate the delays caused when business teams have to rely on over-burdened dev teams or the solution vendor to make updates.
2. Simplified integration capabilities – Integration, whether it’s to internal or external sources, is a challenge for many businesses but it shouldn’t be. Your credit application processing solution should make integration easy, so when new integrations are needed, which they will be, the reliance on dev involvement will be minimal and business users can take the lead.
3. Advanced automation options – Process automation is a vital component to powering business growth and ensuring a first-class customer experience. Your new solution should make it easy to automate processes and also enable you to reuse automation components across multiple business processes.
4. Scalability – You would never invest in a one bed property if you knew you’d need something bigger in a few weeks. So, why treat a processing solution any differently? If you’re investing the time and money in changing solutions you should choose one that you can keep for many years, which means picking one that is able to scale as your business grows!
5. Flexibility – It’s impossible to predict what changes your business will need to adapt to in the future, so your credit application processing solution needs to be flexible enough to allow your business to remain agile. For example, Provenir’s simple drag and drop interface, allows you to build new tools easily when you need them, allowing the business to respond to changing markets and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise.

Wrapping Up

Saying goodbye is never easy. But when you find a credit application processing system that configures to your needs with minimal coding, integrates at lightning speed, and that actually makes your life simpler, you won’t regret making the change.

After all, the (first) end of Michael Jordan’s basketball career brought a triumphant return, a record-breaking winning season, three championships (and how dare we forget about Space Jam). And, the end of Genesis, as the world knew it, brought Phil Collins’ solo career. What would the world be without that rendition of True Colors?

Endings are just the opportunity for something new. It’s time to take the leap!