Automation is the theme that best describes Chesapeake Bank’s innovation roadmap for 2019, Kevin Wood, managing director of the state-chartered community bank’s business lending division, Cash Flow, told Bank Innovation. 

“One of our bank’s main strategic goal is to automate what we can automate, so we can use our staff more effectively,” Wood said.

One example of this strategy is Chesapeake Bank’s announcement from last week in which it unveiled Cash Flow, a digital commercial lending suite of different offerings and services. This digital platform was created in cooperation with Jack Henry’s ProfitStars unit.

“The digital aspect with ProfitStars is to improve the process for our business clients from the online application, to account management to ongoing services and reporting,” Wood told Bank Innovation. “But more so, it provides tremendous value on the back office side of things.”

ProfitStars’ Commercial Lending Center Suite is a full lifecycle management platform that lets the bank digitalize loan origination, decisioning, and portfolio management. This enables the bank to centralize the process, provide more transparency into loan status, “and overall relationship for both bank and borrower,” Wood explained.

Chesapeake Bank has been using some ProfitStars products, such as its factoring and remittance solutions, for several years. Last week’s announcement unveils a fully integrated suite of those offerings on a single platform.

“We had parts of this lending platform in place, some for 10 years,” Wood said. “Think of this announcement as all the pieces coming together in one place. It took us time to get these pieces together, integrate the software and reformat & upgrade the application process and then combine these modules in one offering.”

Now, this commercial lending suite allows borrowers to request loans online, share information with their officers, in addition to already existing remittance and factoring capabilities.

But more significantly, the new platform allows loan officers to automate administrative labor.

“A lot of the manual work for our account executives who manage client portfolios is automated now. We can reduce their tasks, say from 10 items to six. And that time saved goes into doing more risk mitigation, which means we are picking up on potential risk much sooner than before.”

That leads to better results for the customer, he said. It also lets the bank focus on adding more customers.

“Our managers are now managing double the number of clients per employee, from seven to fifteen per executive,” Wood said.

He declined to reveal the exact number of customers and loan volumes.

“And this is just the surface,” Wood said. “We haven’t delved into the other capabilities yet. Right now, the goal is focused on reducing manual labor. So far in the past few years, we doubled our portfolio without adding to the staff. This is what makes automation significant to our business.”

Despite this efficiency, Wood said it is unlikely that Chesapeake Bank will digitalize the entire lending process end to end.

“We are a community bank,” he said. “We want to maintain that human interaction element.”

Based in Kilmarnock, Virginia, Chesapeake Bank has $823 million in assets.