In the fast-paced digital era, successful consumer lending companies are embracing a transformative shift to meet the needs of the modern borrower. By combining innovation, empathy, and efficiency, these lenders are revolutionizing the borrowing experience. In this blog post, we will explore how consumer lending firms are redesigning their processes, leveraging technology, and adopting customer-centric approaches to create a seamless and empowering lending journey for borrowers, and sustained business success for themselves.
So, how do you actually begin to drive this change and align your business to the modern borrower?
To redesign consumer lending, it is crucial to empathize with the borrower's journey. Lenders are investing in comprehensive research to gain insights into borrowers' pain points, preferences, and needs. By understanding the challenges borrowers face and their expectations, lenders can tailor their processes and offerings accordingly, enhancing the overall borrowing experience.
Digital transformation lies at the core of redesigning consumer lending. Lenders are leveraging advanced technologies to streamline their operations. By digitizing processes, borrowers can access loan applications, submit documentation, and track their progress conveniently through user-friendly online platforms and mobile applications.
Recognizing that borrowers have diverse financial needs, consumer lending firms are moving away from one-size-fits-all approaches. Through advanced data analytics, alternative credit scoring models, and easy-to-use complex calculation engines, lenders can personalize loan offerings based on borrowers' unique circumstances. This inclusive approach allows lenders to extend credit to individuals with limited credit histories or unconventional financial profiles, catering to a broader range of borrowers.
Cumbersome documentation requirements have been a longstanding pain point in consumer lending. To address this, lenders are adopting mobile-enabled document submissions. Borrowers can capture and submit necessary documents directly from their smartphones, eliminating the need for manual paperwork and physical visits. This simplification not only enhances convenience but also expedites the loan approval process.
Redesigning consumer lending involves fostering transparent and proactive communication channels. Lenders are leveraging technology to provide instant and personalized information and support to borrowers. Through these platforms, lenders can access accurate information in real time, and borrowers can receive prompt responses to their queries, receive updates on their loan applications, and gain access to financial advice throughout their lending journey.
Data is a valuable asset for consumer lending companies. By harnessing the power of data analytics, lenders can gain insights into customer behavior, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions. By leveraging predictive analytics, lenders can proactively identify potential defaults, optimize pricing strategies, and create tailored loan products that meet the unique needs of individual customers.
In an era of increasing cybersecurity concerns, building trust and ensuring data security are paramount. Lenders are prioritizing robust security measures, complying with regulations, and communicating their privacy policies clearly. By adopting secure digital document storage and vaulting systems, and providing borrowers with transparent processes, and ethical data handling practices, lenders can foster trust and instill confidence in their borrowers.
By redesigning consumer lending with a focus on customer needs and business efficiency, lenders are revolutionizing the landscape. Through digital transformation, personalized offerings, simplified documentation processes, enhanced communication, and a strong commitment to trust and security, lenders are creating new rules of success. This is a market we know and are familiar with: our software solutions enable lenders to capture and analyze vast amounts of data, providing actionable intelligence for risk assessment, fraud detection, and personalized lending offers.
As consumer lending continues to evolve, it is a combination of empathy, trust, and efficiency that will define success and drive the industry forward.
If you're involved in your company's recruitment or HR processes, you likely understand the disappointment of losing top-performing employees. After investing much time and effort in nurturing their skills, watching them resign can be not only disappointing but also costly for the organization.
In the sales industry, retention can be an especially challenging issue, with top performers being constantly courted by rival companies. According to a survey by PayScale, more than half of employees would leave their job for a small salary increase, while nearly 70% would leave if they felt underpaid. One of the main reasons for this challenge is the discrepancy between what salespeople think they will receive and what they get. This can be due to a lack of clarity in the compensation plan, inaccurate calculations, or multiple variables that can affect earnings. The frustration among salespeople can lead them to feel undervalued and seek other employment opportunities.
To prevent this from happening, organizations need to start prioritizing employee retention. By keeping employees happy and engaged, businesses can benefit from improved work satisfaction, increased productivity, and a more attractive company culture. So, what steps can you take to retain your top hires, and what are the benefits of doing so?
Employee retention refers to an organization's ability to keep its employees for a significant period. It measures how well a company can keep its workforce satisfied and motivated, preventing them from leaving for other job opportunities. Employee retention is essential for any organization, as high turnover rates can be costly and strongly disrupt operations. A high retention rate, on the other hand, helps maintain a stable workforce and contributes to a positive work culture, enhanced productivity, and increased employee engagement.
Your employees are your most valuable assets. Retaining them must be your top priority. According to a report by Gallup, engaged employees are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than their disengaged counterparts. Additionally, high-performing employees are often the most difficult to replace, so retaining them can help maintain productivity and efficiency high within your organization.
Moreover, a Society for Human Resource Management study shows that the costs associated with employee turnover can be significant. Direct replacement costs can be as high as 50%-60% of an employee's annual salary, and the total cost of turnover can range from 90% to 200% of the annual salary, depending on the expertise and experience required for the role.
Clearly, the cost of replacing top performers easily outweighs the cost of retaining them. This reinstates the importance of employee retention.
Now that we have established the importance of retaining great talent and hiring let us explore how an Incentive Compensation Management System (ICMS) can enhance retention rates.
ICMS is a software-based solution that enables organizations to manage and streamline their compensation and benefits administration processes, creating an equitable, transparent, and efficient compensation management process. This, in turn, leads to increased job satisfaction, employee retention, and overall organizational success.
Here is how ICMS can help you retain top talent in your organization:
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, employee retention is crucial for any organization's success, and investing in the right tools and processes can make all the difference.
Informa Software’s Incentive Compensation Management System (ICMS) can help organizations retain top talent by creating an equitable and transparent compensation system, designing effective incentive plans, offering personalized growth opportunities, ensuring fairness, and staying flexible. By prioritizing employee retention and leveraging the flexibility delivered by ICMS, organizations can reap the benefits of a highly engaged and productive workforce while avoiding the costs associated with high turnover rates.
Are you struggling with managing complex high-volume calculations like incentive-based compensation or dynamic pricing models? Well, you're not alone. The maxim of ‘change is the only constant’ applies to businesses too, which often experience changes from an HR standpoint (personnel and/or leadership movements) as well as new market conditions, industry regulations and many other factors that affect internal operations… All in all, companies as ‘living organisms’ need to be able to adapt quickly, and anyone in a management position knows this to be an absolute truth.
This is why, after reviewing some of the challenges faced by users and managers, we worked hand in hand with some of our most trusted clients and advisors to come up with an innovative and effective solution of our own; and that’s how Informa’s Incentive Compensation Management System (ICMS) was born.
ICMS is an efficient, low-maintenance, no-code solution with full configurability and security designed to manage complex high-volume calculations, such as incentive-based compensation, pricing models, or sales commissions.
In general, we found that complex incentive calculations take too much time and effort—accurately calculating complex commissions is expensive and complicated. Some of the main challenges we found include:
With full configurability, security, fast and efficient calculations, integration capabilities, and customization features, ICMS does the heavy lifting of complex calculations while offering several unique benefits that help solve the pain points experienced by businesses today.
Featuring drag-and-drop functionality and prebuilt functions and integrations, ICMS puts more problem-solving capabilities into the hands of non-IT business units.
Unlike other solutions that require coding, even for small changes, ICMS is easy to use and maintain, and allows users to make changes and adaptations to their incentive-based compensation programs as easily as managing a calculation sheet and without the need to engage IT or external consultants.
Here is what this means for you:
In today's competitive business landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential. With ICMS's no-code solution, businesses can easily manage their incentive-based compensation programs without the need for complex coding, expensive IT resources, or external help. The flexibility, scalability, and user-friendly nature of ICMS's platform make it a stand-out option in the market, allowing businesses to make faster, data-driven decisions and improve overall performance.
So, if you work in Sales, Finance, HR or Administrative roles, and you're looking for a solution that offers fast and efficient calculations, full configurability, customization and security, look no further. You’ll definitely love ICMS.
In today's constantly changing, faster-than-ever-paced digital world, low-code/no-code platforms can be the answer to accelerate enterprise modernization, agility, and efficiency. What is low-code, you ask? ZDNET’s Daphne Leprince-Ringett explains it as “cutting, as much as possible, the hands-on knowledge that is necessary to build software (…) Instead of writing every single line of code for a given application, users of a low-code or no-code platform can build their project with point-and-click interfaces.”
Although digital technologies are rapidly transforming the business landscape, some companies are struggling to keep up with the changes. They face difficulties in scaling their work, integrating it with their existing information systems, and coordinating their activities across the entire enterprise. This often results in a disjointed collection of isolated applications and digital experiments with limited business value and no clear return on investment.
Low-code/no-code platforms can help bridge this gap and provide a way to rapidly develop, deploy, and integrate digital solutions without requiring extensive technical expertise. This helps businesses become more agile and efficient — enabling them to stay competitive and better serve their customers.
According to this KPMG report, “100% of enterprises who have implemented a low-code development platform have received ROI.” Here are a few reasons why…
All this helps businesses stay competitive and better serve their teams and customers, ultimately leading to increased profits and success.
Some of the benefits of no-code solutions:
In today's competitive business landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential.
No-code solutions can help companies become more agile, cost-effective, and innovative. By empowering non-technical business users to build and customize applications, organizations can quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, leading to sustained growth and profitability.
Discover how Informa’s ICMS's no-code solution helps businesses manage their incentive-based compensation programs without the need for complex coding, expensive IT resources, or external help.
Incentives are natural motivators. Remember when your parents promised you to buy a bike if you got good grades in school? That is a simple example of a performance-based incentive. It gave you a nudge to keep performing at your best. Bottom line: People respond to incentives. This is why most companies adopt something known as incentive compensation. It is the process of compensating employees financially for their exceptional performance.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at what incentive compensation means, see some common challenges that organizations face while managing incentive-based compensation, and review how Informa's Incentive Compensation Management System (ICMS) can help you combat these challenges.
Incentive compensation is a type of pay given to an employee as a reward for achieving specific goals or targets, such as increasing sales or improving productivity. Incentive compensation is often used as a motivator by the leadership to encourage their teams to perform better. Without an incentive, the employee might be less inclined to exceed expectations. There are several ways in which incentive compensation can be structured, including straight commissions, bonuses, prizes, “spiffs,” awards, and recognition.
Managing compensation is a complex and time-consuming task for administrators and sales managers. Either you’re carrying out the entire process manually or dealing with erroneous results resulting in a lack of trust. This means business enablement issues, audit and risk management, lack of detailed reporting, and too much time manually carrying out complex calculations. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
With ICMS, you can easily manage your complex high-volume calculations, such as incentive-based compensation, pricing models, or sales commissions. You’ll save valuable time spent in carrying out complex incentive calculations and get to create unlimited What-if analyses to measure the impact of different scenarios on overall performance and focus efforts accordingly.
Now that you have a fair idea of what incentive compensation management means and its importance in an organization, let’s go through the different challenges in managing incentive-based compensation and how Informa's ICMS helps solve them.
Traditional solutions lack flexibility. Many competitors require coding and technical expertise even for small changes, which can be time-consuming and require additional resources.
ICMS is a user-friendly solution that makes managing and adapting your incentive and compensation programs easy. It is a no-code, low-maintenance solution that can be easily managed, similar to managing a calculation sheet, making it ideal for Excel users. It is customizable and can be tailored to your specific needs, and it is industry and client agnostic, making it more flexible, adaptable, and user-friendly than its competitors. Furthermore, ICMS seamlessly integrates with almost any software you might have already — such as data analytics and CRM — for added flexibility and integration.
Most applications take several hours to process reports, making it difficult to rerun calculations and make adjustments in a timely manner.
ICMS allows you to run calculations in minutes and make adjustments as needed without wasting valuable time waiting for reports to be processed. In addition, ICMS is highly adaptable; it can be configured and adjusted without the need for IT support or external consulting support. This adaptability helps ensure that incentive plans remain adequate and relevant.
One of the biggest challenges in managing incentive compensation is ensuring that the system is auditable and that the calculations are accurate and reliable.
ICMS provides a full audit trail for accurate and reliable calculations, ensuring compliance and minimizing errors and fraud. It allows organizations to easily track and review calculations, identify errors and provide the necessary confidence, helping organizations to demonstrate compliance and ensure accurate, reliable, and trustworthy calculations.
Most organizations need visibility into how different scenarios and changes will impact overall performance, making it difficult to determine where to focus efforts and adjust the incentive plan.
ICMS provides a fully customizable What-If Analysis to allow users to measure the impact of different scenarios on overall performance and determine where to focus their efforts. This feature will enable managers to make projections for individuals and teams, ensuring proper compensation, preventing frustration, and retaining top talent.
Ensuring the security of sensitive data and the visibility of the generated results is vital for organizations to protect sensitive information from unauthorized access.
ICMS addresses security challenges in incentive compensation by providing advanced security features, such as controlling the visibility of results at the user level and encrypting sensitive data within Azure. This ensures that only authorized individuals have access to the results of the calculations and protects sensitive data from unauthorized access or breaches, helping organizations minimize the risk of breaches and unauthorized access.
In conclusion, managing incentive-based compensation can be a real headache for organizations. But with ICMS, it doesn't have to be. ICMS is a powerful and user-friendly solution that makes it easy to manage complex high-volume calculations like incentive-based compensation, pricing models, and sales commissions. With ICMS, you'll have access to many features that make your life easier. You'll be able to run What-If Analysis, make changes quickly with no-code functionality, and integrate with other software you already use. Plus, ICMS is built on Microsoft Azure technology and designed to be client and industry-agnostic so that it will work for you regardless of your industry or client base. So, if you're tired of dealing with the headaches of managing incentive compensation, give ICMS a try. You'll be glad you did!
