Software Deployment for SME Lenders: Best Practices

The US alternative SME lending industry is growing at a lightning pace, even as the country continues to navigate economic uncertainty. 

If you’re using disparate legacy systems or manual processes to interact with clients, collect and transfer data across your lending operation, or manage lending workflows, you will surely struggle. In this context, virtually every organization needs automation to survive, let alone thrive—this is where business-critical cloud solutions can help.

In this article, you will learn everything an SME lender needs to know about selecting and deploying new software. Let’s dive in!

Software Deployment Best Practices

Assimilating new software into your organization takes a concentrated and coordinated effort. A smooth deployment includes choosing, implementing, and managing the right platform for your lending business. If you’re an SME lender, these are the 5 steps of software deployment that you should follow.

1. Consult All Stakeholders

The primary role of any SME lending cloud solution is to facilitate and streamline business processes (from lead management to underwriting and beyond). This means that there will likely be many stakeholders impacted (and from a variety of teams) when you implement new software. 

Think broadly about who might use the platform (even if it’s just a few features). A top-down decision-making process is more harmful than helpful, so be sure to involve all major stakeholders as you look for feedback, especially those who will be using the platform on a daily basis. 

This change management guide outlines a decision matrix that can help you identify the key stakeholders as you look to switch software vendors or deploy one for the first time. 

Here, collaborative brainstorming sessions are helpful for understanding their needs, the problems they face, and how a new platform or tool could make their lives easier and their tasks more efficient.

As a first step, make sure to include the IT, legal, and procurement departments to take care of the technological, regulatory, and vendor management aspects of the software deployment process.

2. Understand How the Platform Can Improve Your Lending Business

Have you ever performed a gap analysis to measure the performance of your lending business and better understand what is holding you back from your expected outcomes? This performance assessment methodology can also help you select the most suitable cloud platform for your alternative lending business. 

If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s basically an exercise where you identify and analyze the gaps in your business to help take you from where you are today to where you want to be. 

For example, let’s say that you identify that you currently have workflow silos between your sales and marketing teams. Although your marketing team is bringing in leads, they often get lost or mishandled in the handover process, resulting in a less-than-impressive closing rate.
What is holding you back from getting your outcome? Can it be solved using a new platform or tool? Perhaps a CRM? A lead management tool?

A gap analysis will help you determine where friction exists, and how you can alleviate it by deploying a new platform to replace an old one.

Using a CRM for this example, here’s one way you could do it:

1. Take a look at your current sales and marketing workflows.
2. Identify what the ideal sales and marketing processes look like.
3. Discuss what the gaps between the ideal and the current process are. 
4. Identify the hurdles preventing your business from achieving this ideal process.
5. Do these involve automation, customer interaction, or data storage/flow?
6. Can these be solved using a CRM platform?

When you clearly understand the problem that you need to solve and the platform that can help, you can then move on to the next step.

3. Prioritize Your Criteria and List the Vendor Options

A decision matrix can give you a logical and non-subjective approach to making the final call on which vendor to go with.

It is a data-driven decision-making tool where you organize your options and decision criteria in a grid of information organized in rows and columns. To use this approach, you will need to identify the critical criteria that your ideal platform should fulfill for your lending business, and prioritize them hierarchically using numerical weight. 

For the CRM example, you would list each of your potential CRM vendors as rows and the criteria/feature you want to have as columns. With your team, you can then review each vendor and see which of the features they offer.

By comparing these criteria/features against the CRM vendors you’re considering, you can understand which one ticks the most (and most important) boxes for your business.

Here are a few points to get you started:

• Budget: what’s the maximum you’re willing to pay for a new platform or tool? Consider long-term and short-term costs.
• Scalability: are you going to scale your business soon? Is your lending seasonal, with more client/prospect traffic in certain months requiring heavier platform usage? 
• Implementation timeline: how urgent are the problems that you need to solve? 
• Vendor service support: do you have a competent in-house technical team capable of solving technical issues, or are you likely to rely more on the vendor’s support services?
• Personalization capabilities: how advanced or detail-oriented would you like to be in providing personalized service to your customers?
• Cloud vs. on-site: do you prefer the ease and flexibility of a cloud platform (most do), or would you like to have a platform that is available on-site for your team to manage and have complete control over?

Once you have a decision matrix that’s completely filled in, it’s easier to make the decision that’s right for your business needs.

4. Make a Decision (And Stick To It!)

Once you’ve brainstormed and analyzed the various vendor options using a decision matrix, it’s now time to make the final decision. You’ve weighed the most important factors to your teams and identified the software that best fulfills them. 

If you have a clear winner, congrats, you’ve found your new platform! If you’re still stuck between a few choices, consider the following questions to get to the final result: 

1. What do you need to say “yes?”
2. Which criteria are nice-to-haves rather than must-haves?
3. Are you hoping for your new software to solve several problems simultaneously? If so, which ONE problem is a priority for you to solve right now?

Adopt a focused approach to both the gap analysis and decision matrix, and you’ll find yourself easily able to prioritize what matters most when selecting a vendor.

5. Perform Final Due Diligence

Now, before signing the final agreement with your vendor, it’s essential to make sure you cross your t’s and dot your i’s. 

Ensure that your software vendor is on the same page as you—check once more that you are receiving the features you expect and that they will roll out the software according to a release schedule that you’ve both agreed to.

Additionally, it’s also important to collect and review the following documents from your vendor:

• Master service agreement (MSA): a contract between you and the vendor stating the terms that will govern future agreements.
• Service-level agreement (SLA): an agreement that guarantees a certain level of service provided by the vendor. It details the metrics by which the service will be measured and possible penalisations if the service standards aren’t met.
• Security and compliance documentation: 10-20 policies that cover an exhaustive list of topics, the most important (and most expansive) of which is usually the Information Security Policy. The vendor should also demonstrate that they are certified by industry standards.
• Training and support docs: documentation, guides, and videos that instruct your teams on how to make the best use of the platform and deal with poss, and also cover troubleshooting.

Gathering these documents gives you the certainty that the vendor offers a serious and dependable service.

Cloud Lending Software = Sustainable Lending Success

Software deployment is always a long process. Keep this guide at hand to go through it as seamlessly as possible, and don’t miss any steps.

Follow the best practices outlined in the sections above, and you’re sure to be up and running with a platform that solves your lending pain points. 

Automation is a powerful tool to scale your lending business and provide a personalized borrower experience. Why stop with a CRM or marketing platform when you can automate the entire lending process with an industry-leading SaaS lending platform? 

Onyx IQ was designed for small business lenders looking to use best-in-class technology in one full-service platform. To learn more about what we can do for you, request a demo today or contact us at info@onyxiq.com.