Blend
Across industries, strategies that support personalization are often focused on an individual level, but a personalized experience can also be tailored to fit the needs of a specific population or even to match the entity offering the experience itself. White label lending platforms offer the flexibility to align the consumer experience with a financial institution’s brand or personality, and in addition, with whatever their specific consumers are seeking in a lending engagement.
By using a white label lending platform behind the scenes, lenders can offer easy, intuitive, and coherent experiences, embedded with lending best practices, that come to life with the personalization needed to resonate with their diverse customer base.
The benefits of a white label lending platform
Today’s consumers expect the digital application process to be fast and streamlined. Yet, many financial institutions don’t have the technology or manpower to build their own customized technology solutions that support a fully branded, integrated, and end-to-end application process.
A white label lending application, like Blend, allows financial institutions to leverage a customizable lending platform to personalize their technology solution and brand it as their own. This means that instead of disjointed application experiences, they can deliver a cohesive application experience from end-to-end: one with minimal disruptions and without the need to change URLs. This cohesion reduces unnecessary steps that can introduce friction and distrust, putting consumers at greater ease.
Underpinning the personalized front end is a back end designed to ensure best practices for lenders’ customer service. Blend features such as embedded data connections and user-centered design support experiences that are customer friendly, and importantly, that convert.
A Blend customer story: Assurance Financial and Abby
What does a white label lending platform look like in action? Here’s a closer look at how one of our lender partners, Assurance Financial, leveraged Blend’s technology to extend their market reach with a modern and personalized digital application experience from beginning to end.
Why Assurance Financial chose Blend’s Digital Lending Platform
Assurance Financial was founded in 2001 to service consumers at all stages of the lending process. As a company that puts the borrower experience front and center, Assurance Financial was looking to implement a complete solution that ticked a series of important boxes in their organization.
For starters, every step of the process needed to be easy and transparent for consumers. On the back end, multiple interconnected technologies had to transition from one to another seamlessly, including Assurance Financial’’s marketing operating system (Total Expert) and their loan operating system (Encompass).
As Katherine Campbell, Assurance Financial Director of Marketing says, “The big reason that we went with Blend is that there is a lot of communication between them and our existing systems.” Blend’s digital platform fits into Assurance Financial’s borrower journey, moving the company’s leads from their CRM into their LOS.
How Assurance Financial brought a human touch to the application process
While Blend’s white label lending platform satisfied Assurance Financial’s requirements for consumer ease and back-end integrations for loan teams, the organization took personalization one step further with Abby. She’s the friendly avatar representing the human core of Assurance Financial’s digital experience.
Abby is a digital loan assistant that Campbell created using Blend’s branding configuration panel. With Abby, applicants who visit the Assurance Financial website are given the choice to connect with Abby or a loan officer. As Campbell says, “At some point, everyone is going to have this digital experience that is easy and fast. It’s expected. I decided we needed to personify what we were doing for long-term success.”
The benefits are twofold: Abby provides a visible front end to Blend’s digital back end while giving applicants the ability to take advantage of the flexible functionality that Blend’s platform offers. Abby is there around-the-clock to offer a personal touch to the lending experience. And if at any point customers require personal assistance or have a question, Blend’s software lets loan agents jump in at any time.
“We wanted to make it clear that on the other side of every click, there’s a real human,” says Campell.
At Assurance Financial, efficiency, growth, and customer satisfaction are the three pillars that shape the way they acquire customers and meet their needs throughout the entire loan process — it’s always top of mind. Blend’s comprehensive, end-to-end digital platform, along with Abby, was the right solution to support these pillars at every stage of Assurance Financial’s loan application process.
See what our white label lending platform can do for your organization. Download our case study Creating a delightful digital brand to learn more about how lenders can capture greater market share through clever marketing strategies with Blend’s transformative technology platform.