Five ways to streamline your IF onboarding experience & approach

At Dancerace, we’re on a mission to simplify invoice finance – making it easier to manage and more cost-effective for lenders and borrowers. 

Streamlining IF starts with rethinking how lenders onboard prospects. Here are five ways Dancerace’s f3 onboarding system – part of our complete, connected IF lending platform – can help make your onboarding experience and approach faster, simpler and smarter.

1. Accelerate pre-screening and proposal-generation

Lenders can use f3 to keep the qualification stage as light-touch as possible for prospects.

Instead of requesting large sets of documents upfront (which is usually impractical before you’ve built rapport with a prospect), or committing to a face-to-face meeting, a more efficient qualification process looks something like this:

1.  Do an initial intro phone call understand the prospect’s need at high level and explain how your solutions work. Book a face-to-face meeting. 
2.  Connect to prospect’s accounting system via Open Accounting in f3, to view their financials and MI. No need to send an email wishlist.
3.  Use f3 to perform an initial analysis before the meeting – faster and more insightful than a manual review. 
4.  Draft a large part of the credit submission before visiting the prospect. At the meeting, cover every gap you need to finish credit submission, rather than repeatedly asking for and analysing docs from the prospect.
5.  Deliver an initial credit proposal to the prospect.
6.  If the prospect accepts the proposal, perform a full on-premises audit (where necessary).
 

This approach moves you from request, chase, collate, input and read to a far more insightful analysis step that informs your initial decision and delivers value to the prospect sooner. It also reduces back and forth and follow-up questions whilst your competitors (IF or otherwise) get ahead.

Armed with your prospect’s financial and management data, you’re ready to put together a compelling, credible credit proposal quickly, which demonstrates to the prospect that you understand their business deeply and move quickly, increasing your chance of winning the deal.

2. Ditch your manual onboarding process  

Requesting, checking and manually inputting complicated underwriting data is enormously time-consuming for you and your prospect. Onboarding a new client can take as long as four to eight weeks, with the majority of time spent getting started, before the credit submission. This incurs significant upfront cost for you, which is passed on to the client.

Gathering this data is a major headache for the prospect. Receiving the data is nearly as bad – a drip-feed of documents attached to emails that must be sifted into spreadsheets. This slow, manual data-gathering process drives the perception that invoice finance is outdated.

A large proportion of the data collected from a prospect is financial. Sales ledger information; balance sheet; P&L. All this and more is already held in one highly organised database – the prospect’s accounting system. It makes no sense to manually copy and paste it into a different system. With f3 you simply connect the systems up.

Now you’ll be reviewing information in the same way you'll monitor and fund the client ongoing, rather than just being updated via one-time export and emailing of info (where exact timing between docs might not fully align).

This massively streamlines and optimises the onboarding process, while structuring the outputs. These time-savings equate to increased revenue.

3. Lead prospects through a tightly structured and centralised process

The prospect’s long, painful information-gathering process is not only offputting; it’s also easy to mess up. You give them a long list, they go off and try to find everything on the list and send it through to you. They often forget something. Or they send a series of separate emails and somehow one of the emails goes missing.

f3 offers a better way. You can take prospects through a step-by-step process in which they can only move to the next step once they have completed the current one. It’s psychologically easier, but it also makes it almost impossible for prospects to forget or miss something. Prospects can come back and resume their application process at any time without losing their progress. Once the prospect reaches the final step, everything is already uploaded and structured for analysis.

f3 adds structure on the lender-side, too. Collaboration tools in f3 and our new Workspace feature make it easy to assign and monitor tasks between teams, with full permission controls and auditability across sales, underwriting and onboarding activities.

4. Use digital analysis to accelerate assessment

When you receive data digitally from a prospect’s accounting system, coupled with the information and documents they’ve entered and uploaded, you can then rapidly analyse it and gain instant, interactive financial insights. f3 displays their full business and accounting information in graphs and tables, alongside key indicators such as aging profiles, debtor concentration, dilution analysis and P&L trends. If you want to find out more, you can drill down into individual customers and invoices or slice and dice the data as necessary.

Gathering data in your f3 system also works for the prospect. If they’re approved, you can set up their new funding account at the touch of a button, in our in-life c3 and e3 systems. A prospect becomes a client in a smooth, streamlined process. f3 even maintains their Open Accounting connection during the handover between systems.

5. Ensure all pre- and post-commencement conditions are met

One important, additional benefit to this process is that f3 offers a permanent in-system record of the assessment you made and the conditions to which you agreed to onboard the client. Items such as pre- and post-commencement conditions are stored in your c3 system and can be integrated into your day-to-day workflow using reminder, oversight and reporting features across the Dancerace platform.  

Whilst accounting data will typically be maintained automatically, any supplementary information required periodically can be added just as easily to your scheduled events in Workspace and elsewhere. Tasks will no longer be forgotten in the ongoing day-to-day rush of work. So when you come to do a retrospective on a risk event, determining that “we had intended to do that” will be a thing of the past.

Optimised onboarding has transformational potential

If onboarding is frustrating for you, you can bet it’s frustrating for prospects and brokers, too.

In recent years, we’ve seen banks use f3 to cut their onboarding timeline from six weeks to 48 hours. Time and money saved this way frees teams to do higher value work or simply take on more clients. Digitised onboarding positions your products as modern, professional and credible – a critical factor to enable invoice finance to compete with other forms of business finance.

If you’re looking to optimise your onboarding approach and borrower experience, get in touch. Our IF experts are ready to help.