Battling back against the big banks

The bigger banks are already on top of this trend, he suggested: “A lot of the larger banks have invested a fair amount of time and money to create a lot of advancements on the front end,” Gupta added. “But once you do advancements on the front end, you also have to figure out how to advance all the decisioning lifecycle, and that takes a fair amount of uplift of data rails, modeling rails decisioning cycles – especially if you’re going to use newer data, lots of data and make sure you’re compliant with all the regulations, etc. There’s a necessary need for automation, governance that allows for this.”

Yet smaller lenders are lagging behind in such digital offerings, Gupta continued. And even offering digitization, it has to be done in a way that ensures market compliance with speed in transactions, he cautioned.

“The smaller banks have been slightly caught off guard because the pace at which consumers have gone to wanting everything digitally is very high,” Gupta said. Absent such digitization, smaller banks run the risk of having consumers apply for services only to go elsewhere to close the deal quicker, he said.

“They have to move forward to really offer things the consumer expects, which is digitally,” Gupta said. “But they also run the risk of offering it without the same level of speed and governance and sophistication.”