Coast Capital, one of Canada’s largest credit unions, has partnered with digital lending solution nCino to automate its lending processes on a national scale with a cloud-based solution, and is now kicking off the second part of its three-phase automation plan to support its expansion.

The $19.4 billion credit union has 593,000 members, making it one of the largest financial institutions in Canada by assets and membership, and is also one of the few national credit card companies, Lisa Colangelo, Coast Capital’s senior vice president for retail banking, told Bank Automation News.

“The unique thing for us is that, in Canada typically credit unions are very provincially focused, but what we have in Coast Capital is a national credit union,” Colangelo said.

In order to grow on a national scale, however, the credit union had to automate its manual on-boarding and lending processes, which were “highly manual,” Colangelo said, adding that this “limited the amount of opportunities we had available to provide unsecured credit to members.”

The Surrey, British Columbia-based credit union partnered with nCino for the automation. In the first phase of the automation plan, the credit union focused on retail, digitalizing on-boarding and automating unsecured lending. Customers can now fill out required paperwork online from home rather than going into the bank.

“That is a big step for our national expansion across Canada,” Colangelo said.

The conversion rate of applications, which compares the number of online applications submitted for review to the number of online applications begun, has significantly improved to about 70 percent from 18 percent year over year since launching phase one, the bank reported.

In the recently launched second phase of the credit union’s plan, the automation will focus on onboarding and lending in the commercial and business banking sectors, including loan origination, account opening, underwriting and automated decisioning. The third and final release will automate residential mortgages, Colangelo said.

The nCino bank operating system automates all Coast Capital’s lending products in one platform, handling the lifecycle of the loan, including due diligence activities and other previously manual tasks related to the loan, according to Cam Sterrett, nCino’s general manager in Canada.

Founded in 2012, nCino’s solution is built on customer relationship management company Salesforce.com, and combines customer relationship management, loan origination, account opening, workflow, content management, business process management, customer engagement and instant reporting on a single platform. The solution integrates with Coast’s core banking platform, through the fintech Temenos, Sterrett said.

“We’re going to improve a lot of that manual effort and tie together what can be a disjointed process, bound together by email and Microsoft Office solutions, an Excel here and a Word file there,” Sterrett told BAN. “That’s going to give Coast a really nice advantage over their peers, who have siloed technology point solutions, disparate systems.”

Coast Capital is joining the current trend toward automating lending processes. Other banks using nCino’s lending solution include TD Bank, Fifth Third, and Great Southern Bank, and the provider is considered a best-in-class loan origination system by the business and tech industry analyst Aite Group, which lists nCino’s competitors as Finastra, Fiserv, Q2 and TurnKey Lender.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.