European growth made easier with streamlined commercial loan servicing systems

Even in tough macroeconomic times, commercial lending keeps markets moving and banks growing. And on the face of it, there are few better places to drive growth than Europe, where a multitude of bustling economies provide big opportunities for cross-border expansion.

But loan servicing operations can be complex and costly when you’re lending to businesses in many European countries – especially as a result of disparate booking systems, multiple currencies and the need to comply with different finance, accounting and risk reporting requirements.

Global institutions with an extensive network of operations need to apply both GAAP and IRFS accounting standards. This makes it challenging to provide a consistent data pool for all stakeholders, particularly as today, more than ever, lenders must make their accounting calculations quickly.

Whenever you make or hedge a loan, you need to know you’ve got the funds to cover the whole deal and of course you need to ensure you have it correctly valued. If you’re not calculating in real time, there’s more chance that interest rates will move against you to cause a funding mismatch and effectively a loss.

So, to support European or multi-national growth, loan operations need to move up a gear, get closer to core accounting and ledger systems and call time on batch-based, end-of-day calculations.

At the same time, lenders must continue to consolidate their technology. It’s still not unusual for a major bank to operate several loan servicing systems in Europe alone, which compromises integration, reporting and scalability, as well as compliance and efficiency.

The end goal is to unify a bank’s commercial loan operations in a single digital ecosystem, where it’s both faster and easier to manage customers in multiple regions, accommodate regulatory variations and scale to handling larger volumes of loans.

With ease of use comes greater cost-efficiency and productivity, including the ability to react more quickly to events like market updates and changes to foreign exchange and base rates.

Wave goodbye to the data entry tasks, manual workarounds and key person risks that have traditionally hampered loan operations; warmly welcome intuitive technology that guides users through lending processes and advises what to do next.

Wherever commercial lenders are planning to expand, across Europe or the world, the holy grail is to grow without having to add headcount. With a single loan servicing system for your whole lending business, based on real-time, event-based, user-friendly technology, you’re already in the best place to streamline your operations and accelerate international growth.