Tackling The Deposit Dilema
In lending, speed isn’t a luxury—it’s the difference between a funded loan and a missed opportunity. Community financial institutions are under pressure to move faster, improve workflows, and deliver better borrower experiences. But one step consistently drags things down: income verification. Not because it's complex. But because it's invisible.
The 3-Day Problem
Income verification often adds 2–3 full business days to the loan process. Not due to credit risk or underwriting. But because of routine friction:
- Missing documents
- Disconnected workflows
- Manual follow-up processes
One credit union saw a HELOC take over 36,000 minutes—25 business days—to fund. Personal loans sat for 4,000 minutes, simply waiting on paperwork.
These bottlenecks rarely show up in reports. But they show up in lost trust, strained teams, and loans that never make it to funding.
Where the Time Actually Goes
The slowdowns follow a predictable pattern:
- Borrowers delay responding to income doc requests
- Staff follow up manually—emails, calls, calendar pings
- Docs arrive via multiple channels: email, upload portals, even paper
- Team members dig through inboxes and folders just to confirm receipt
- Files are often incomplete, unreadable, or incorrect
Each step adds time. And when tracking lives in email threads or post-its, no one can see where a loan truly stands.
Why It Keeps Happening
Income verification doesn’t fail because people aren’t doing their jobs. It fails because the process is off-platform and unowned. LOS systems don’t track it. Dashboards don’t display it. Leadership doesn’t see it until a member complains—or walks away.
The result: hours lost to repetitive follow-ups, rework, and stress that doesn’t show up in the data.
What Changes When You Fix the Friction
Institutions that address this gap recover meaningful time:
- Document requests go out instantly with clear instructions
- Uploads are confirmed automatically
- Incomplete or wrong files get flagged early
- Everything moves back into the core lending workflow
The result? Days of delay are cut to hours. Loans move forward without the drag of rework or uncertainty.
What To Look At Internally
If your lending department is spending hours each week on follow-ups, consider:
- How many loans are “approved” but unfunded?
- How often do uploads go unacknowledged?
- How many borrowers stall out after submitting income docs?
- What’s the average time from income doc request to receipt?
These aren’t abstract questions. They define your actual speed to fund.
Rethinking the Invisible Delay
Every lending department has a bottleneck. For many, it’s not underwriting. It’s not volume. It’s income verification.
And it’s hiding in plain sight.
Fixing it doesn’t require a full system overhaul. It just starts with looking at where the time goes—and asking why.
If you're still chasing income docs manually, there’s likely more delay in your pipeline than you think.