Capital Farm Credit Loan
At Capital Farm Credit (CFC), PCG has provided a complete enterprise solution.
CFC is an Agricultural Credit Association (ACA) and is part of the Farm Credit System. The ACA and Farm Credit System specialize in loans for farms, ranches, timberland, recreational property, and agribusinesses, as well as rural homes, agricultural equipment, livestock and agricultural operating capital.
Starting from a “CRUD”-oriented loan program, we incorporated a Microsoft Office 2007 Outlook add-in and a SharePoint web part to integrate the project into the client’s internal SharePoint 2007 environment. While it is widely used across different business units within the organization including lending, appraisal, loan processing & servicing, compliance, etc., it also serves as a data dashboard for senior management to measure performance.
Microsoft Outlook Add-in for archiving
The application ensures CFC’s compliance with the latest regulations governing the financial industry. It improves the efficiency of record keeping and eliminates navigation by using a SharePoint-integrated Iron Speed Designer Loan application. The Outlook 2007 Add-In lets users easily “tag and save” an email from their inbox into the loan database on SQL Server 2005. It also enables the user to identify whether the email should be associated with a customer or a customer’s specific loan(s). In our client’s environment, SharePoint 2007 has been adopted as the loan document management platform, while our custom-built borrower web part is used for easy querying, filtering, and displaying loan documents.
The Microsoft Office 2007 Outlook add-in inserts an associate context menu from the inbox to give users easy access to tag and save an email.
Users access this screen to save customer or loan information to the associated item.
Customer & Loan Dashboard View
CFC Loan is used internally by loan officers to manage the loans and provide loan services to borrowers. Custom pages allow users view and download emails tagged from the Outlook Add-In, manage associated loan covenants, and add and retrieve related documents stored within SharePoint directly. By integrating its document-managing functions from SharePoint, we are taking advantage of its built-in security and scalability as well as letting users view those documents within the context of the loan. This integration brings more efficiency to the business routine and allows users to access all information they need within one application.
The life cycle of a loan involves multiple professionals and a series of steps including processing, underwriting, closing, and ultimately servicing the loan. There is a lot of communication going on, including inquiries and verification. Under the latest industry regulation, some communication needs to be recorded for audit purposes. Traditionally, this could be accomplished by copying and pasting the email text into a separate Word document or copying it into another application. However, besides being time-consuming, this multi-step procedure is error prone. Our Iron Speed Designer solution puts a context menu item right in user’s email inbox and lets them “tag and save” an email with ease. It displays a loan selection screen for the user to associate this email appropriately and save to the database. On a typical business day, when there are many inquiries from different customers and internal departments on various loans, this solution has proven to save a myriad of steps in the process and improve accuracy for audits.
Customers access a central portal screen to view tagged emails, covenants, and SharePoint correspondence, relating to their loan. Clicking the email view icon will download the Outlook 2007 email in its native .msg format.
To answer inquiries from customers, loan professionals need to look at correspondence from different stages of the loan cycle. Since some of the customers may not have access to the loan application, those users will access the SharePoint site directly to review this correspondence. Although our client has already structured their document repository in a very organized fashion, SharePoint has some innate out-of-box limitations. The documents or folders cannot be easily queried from a business perspective. Our borrower web part tackles this issue by providing an easy-to-use user interface that exposes various commonly used attributes for users to access their target correspondence quickly.
Instead of going to a different page, users add and edit a covenant in a pop-up panel, enabled by using Telerik RadWindow. In some child tabs, the approach utilizing left and right list boxes lets users select child entities in a much easier manner.
SharePoint Integration
Our integrated system houses loan applications, amount approved, appraisals processed, customer information, email records, etc., while it dynamically links SharePoint correspondences. Mortgage bankers, customer service representatives, loan servicing staff, and the company’s upper management from marketing, operations, and strategy units log in at different times to monitor the business and review reports from the receipt of a loan application to its being approved to its servicing stage. Email notifications remind appropriate personnel of next steps and loan covenant due dates as they approach.
The Documents tab provides access to the corresponding SharePoint document library. Users can also upload documents directly into the SharePoint environment in the appropriate loan folder by clicking on the New icon and using an upload page.
System Size and Scope
CFC Loan utilizes two Microsoft SQL Server databases with over 60 database tables and 40 views, containing more than 200,000 records. We estimate that more than 250 users access the application throughout the day.
User Adoption
We are working with Capital Farm Credit to deploy the application to several additional business units, adding hundreds of new users. We’ve continued adding features to the application to enhance the user experience. Soon the system will support additional SharePoint features including tree-views, tagging and reminder email subscriptions.
