Sageworks, a Raleigh, N.C., headquartered firm that offers lending, credit risk and portfolio risk solutions to U.S. financial institutions today announced the sweeping enhancements the company will launch later this month.
The product changes are sourced from client feedback and continue the company’s effort to eliminate data entry and provide bank and credit union clients with better information for risk management.
Within Sageworks Workflow, the company’s business process management solution, bankers can now use if/then and conditional logic in the development of workflow templates. This change will allow bankers to more seamlessly match their existing credit policy to automation. As an institution grows – organically or through M&A – this growth introduces added complexity for protecting the institution’s credit culture and maintaining their credit processes. The enhancements to Sageworks Workflow make it easier for institutions to use Sageworks for systematizing and tracking compliance with these standards across teams or users.
The company’s risk rating software is also being updated to fuel dual risk ratings that will assess risk of both the borrower and the loan. This functionality will be useful for institutions looking for more granular risk data to leverage within expected loss calculations, loan pricing scenarios and reporting. While the added functionality will be available, it will not be required; institutions may elect to continue using the single risk rating model.
An additional change throughout the software is the introduction and support of custom metrics in the life of the loan. If an institution uses a unique financial ratio in underwriting, risk rating, covenants, etc., the institution can define and track that metric throughout the loan’s lifecycle, increasing defensibility and consistency of analysis loan-to-loan. The lifetime tracking is made possible by Sageworks’ integrated platform, with information flowing seamlessly between steps, and is a functionality that most software vendors cannot support.
“We understand that banks may have metrics unique-to-them or specific calculations as defined in their credit policy, and that specificity necessitates that their software be flexible. With custom metrics supported throughout our platform, we look forward to meeting all of these unique needs and bolstering the defensibility of our clients’ credit analytics through documentation and consistency,” explains Scott Ogle, CEO at Sageworks.
A final major release from the company pertains to document management. Many institutions use Sageworks Document Library as a web-based file storage system, and with the April product release, Sageworks will launch Document Integration. This new product allows bankers to automatically push document uploads from Sageworks into a long-term storage or an imaging system without manual updates.