A walkthrough of the cross-sell opportunity in business lending, and how our embeddable lending brain rapidly enables this valuable opportunity, which quickly increases revenue with low risk and minimal overhead.
Reach out to me to get our AI document processing system embedded directly into your current workflows.
Why Cross-Sell?
The cheapest attention you have is with an existing customer.
They are already reading your emails, and will take your calls.
If you can easily and automatically get a sense for their debt and deposits stack as part of an existing process, you are in a great position to offer valuable cross-sell products.
In business lending, the automated cross-sell is a great opportunity, but it has a few things inhibiting the process.
Blockers
There is pain across all the layers of people, process, and technology:
- Sales people want to sell. Selling is simple, measurable, rewarded. To convince them to engage in something that adds complexity, or friction, is always a challenge.
- Sales processes are designed around simple deals, cross-selling introduces complexity.
- Sales technology, historically, is inflexible, simplistic, and constrained.
These constrain cross-selling to an afterthought.
Here are two key pains we see across lending niches that generalise to the painful patterns we are solving for.
1-Community Banks missing their mandate
Acting as a partner to businesses is an important part of the role played by community banks. The mini-CFO capability is a significant strategic initiative.
However, because new deals are led by originators and brokers, the pen and paper underwriting of community banks typically struggle to enable an efficient cross-selling process.
Loan officers are looking to push new deals through. Even if they could identify an easy bundling or consolidation of products, the incremental value to them is minimal, for a high-lift analytical task. If anything, it could distract from the deal.
This is often because their narrow process and tech rails cannot adapt to the more complex deal structure required to achieve an effective cross-sell. The process of identifying cross-sell gets disregarded.
From our experience, senior leadership are desperate to capitalise on these opportunities, and technology providers struggle to cater to these workflows.
2-Altfi lenders not automating cross-sell to churned applicants
There is a missed opportunity in customers that bounce on the data capture flow, and were never re-engaged.
They were entirely committed, fully engaged, working their way through the documentation. For whatever reason, PARTIAL_SUBMISSION
This customer, having submitted documents that contain valuable clues to what might make a compelling reactivation offer, should be targeted.
The funnel leaking at this stage is a problem, and if there is sufficient data to act on, it should be automated.
The opportunity goes beyond “Please complete the form” and well into:
“You came for cash advance loan, did you know we also offer an insured interest account, and can beat your current rates by 1.2%, it’s minutes away
Enabling the Cross-Sell
Across the processes, there are two documents to consider:
1-Bank statements
In all cases, there are clues in the bank statements.
Historically, bank statement processing is done badly, it’s offline, async, manual, cursory. This stalls the cross-sell opportunity or misses it entirely.
A bank API connection could automate analysis, but businesses are much more likely to churn if forced to connect their bank accounts. The least friction is with bank statement PDF processing.
Once the data is extracted, the challenge is in identifying the subtle clues that can inform a line of inquiry. Clues that are earmarked as opportunities to queue up as an instant cross-sell offer:
“I noticed you have X, I’d love to know if you saw that we just launched Y.” The key is to get those statements as early as possible. Dress it up in the most appealing way possible, but get them early, and use Sea.dev to act fast.
Consolidating the debt and deposit stack leads to happy customers, and the bank statements are the first piece of the puzzle.
2-Financial statements
Ideally, you’d ask for management accounts, or better yet, just ask for a full breakdown of all accounts and loans. However, you cannot realistically ask for this when you most need it.
When they are received, financials should be used to complete the picture, and it is critical that they are spread and ratios extracted automatically. This supplements cross-selling, by reviewing the borrower’s complete financial profile.
However, financials are often supplied after some level of commitment, and ideally the cross-sell clues should be well in hand before requesting financials.
Sea.dev makes low risk low effort cross-selling through automated analysis, engagement, and closing a reality.
The Sea.dev Cross-Sell solution
Through instantly processing and analysing bank statements, we can uncover cross-sell opportunities in real time.
Instead of after the fact, it can become part of the deal, with minimal overhead.
We uncover deposits and debt stack, look for clues on churn, discover unmet needs, and competitive lenders.
We enable this with an embeddable document processing capability fine-tuned to convert bank-statements and financials into valuable actionable insights.
Instant, validated, sanitised, fraud-proof, multilingual.
Next steps
Directly automating key business metric drivers is always a win.
Rapidly enabling these at scale is where we come in 🌊
Real-time extraction, enrichment, and analysis of documents is the key to unlocking cross-sell as part of a primary offer.
Get in touch to book a demo