“There’s a tendency to look at lending as a product. Financial institutions really look at lending with their bottom-line in mind. Certainly at Alliant, we take a very different approach. Lending is really seen as a means of supporting our members and aligning with their needs. It’s all about the membership and their aspirations and objectives, and keeping their needs at the forefront. We try to find lendtech partners that are capable of fulfilling those needs to a greater extent and helping us with a product set that is transparent, that allows for easy price comparison, and that benefits our members’ financial journey, as opposed to this mentality of needing to benefit our institution’s bottom line.”

“With auto refinance, FIs are dependent upon the fintechs. We estimated the full TAM to be a trillion dollar market. At a certain point, if everything were out there...somewhere around 100 billion would be refinanced every month. So, there’s still some room to grow in the [auto refinance] market.”

“Make business decisions and not credit decisions. This is something that I often work with my people on just because we have this matrix of credit guidelines between a FICO and a DTI. This is not the world that our members live in. There’s a million other things that come into play when you make a decision or credit decision. The first thing I always tell them is, don’t ever come to me and say, ‘I’ve got a 600 member, or I’ve got a 750 application.’ This is not the way to make credit decisions or evaluate whether you make a loan. Look at the totality of the situation – understand the profile of the applicant and make a business decision, not just a credit decision.”

“Really put a focus on the employee and customer experience, and then develop your processes around that. I’ve worked at a lot of organizations where they say, ‘Well, this is our process. So we have to make sure we tell our customers about our processes, whether they like it or not.’ Well, that doesn’t always work out so well. So I call it service-oriented process, as opposed to process-oriented service. We say, ‘what is the best way to deliver this product or service that ensures the least amount of friction, not only for our employees, but for the end consumer as well?’” 

“I think a lot of the transactions that happen online are truly transactional in nature. And what happens on the phone, or in a branch, is more relational in nature. So, when people call in, or they talk to someone in our branch, they truly want advice. So, for example, when people used to come into a credit union branch, they would come in, cash a check, withdraw cash, (it’s) very transactional in nature. Now, you can do all of that online. Most of the time when people come in now, they truly want some advice. So an example I’ll share with you is, all of our branch employees are being trained to become certified financial coaches. Our employees’ skill set needs to move from cashing checks to being able to coach a member on how to create a budget, how to start saving for retirement, those types of things. So, transactional online but relational in person.”