Scaling Underwriting
Background
As we grew, it became clear that we needed a structured, standardized way to process loan applications. As the owner of our loan application process, I initiated, designed, and implemented Zomia’s first standardized underwriting process.
This is a list view of loan applications still “In Progress” towards the end of the 2019-2020 loan application season. We use Insightly, a popular small business CRM.
Impact
Now a core process at Zomia, this pipeline brought dozens of critical tasks into a logical flow and cut the processing time per application from ten hours to two.
In two application cycles, this pipeline saved us months of work while increasing our capacity to process applications at scale.
Clicking on an applicant’s name would display a card like this — a high-level summary of the applicant’s status in the loan application pipeline. From this view, you could click through into upcoming and past tasks, notes taken by team members, messages between the student and Zomia, and even access the student’s loan application.
Other effects
Enabled the engineering team to identify new tasks/processes to automate.
Created transparency around who was responsible for what and when, eliminating redundancies.
Increased adoption and elevated the importance of our CRM.
One of our engineers liked this so much he used the pipeline as a template to help his family’s business standardize some of their core logistic processes.
Called “Activity Sets” in Insightly, each stage of the pipeline includes various tasks that must be completed before the pipeline can advance to the next stage. Each year, the team reviews these tasks and tries to see what we can consolidate or automate out.