Interview: Farm Credit Illinois transition to new software seamlessly with SimpleImport

“SimpleImport is used by our whole credit underwriting team multiple times a day.”

Jon Cook, Vice President – Credit Services Division at Farm Credit Illinois

Farm Credit Illinois is a farmer owned and directed agricultural lending cooperative serving 10,000 farm families, agribusinesses, and rural landowners in the southern 60 counties of Illinois with competitive and flexible financing and crop insurance expertise. Their deep understanding of agriculture enables them to provide knowledgeable and effective service. 

An interview with Jon Cook, Vice President – Credit Services Division at Farm Credit Illinois

What specific challenges were you trying to solve that made you look for a solution?

Farm Credit Illinois (FCI) recently implemented the nCino suite for our loan origination platform. During our design and discovery phase, we realized we were going to have a gap in our credit underwriting process because our previous configuration for uploading financial data sets was not going to be compatible with nCino.

We needed to upload data sets from Excel to the loan origination system for risk rating and other company objectives. Along with our technology provider, Farm Credit Financial Partners, Inc. (FPI), we began the search to find a solution to fit our needs.

What were you (or weren’t you!) looking for in a solution?

• A cost effective, secure, and efficient tool to import data from Excel into our nCino platform.
• A solution that could be easily used by our Credit Department and fit seamlessly within the process without adding additional navigation or clicks.
• We could not afford to sacrifice our member experience by negatively impacting turnaround time in our loan decisions or employee engagement with a complex or cumbersome solution.
• We did not want a complex solution that would require more regular monitoring or resource demand for support, or leave us vulnerable to data errors in transition.

After a process of vetting different solutions, from internally built custom code to outside solutions, we found ProvenWorks. The tool SimpleImport fit our need to efficiently and effectively upload data from Excel to nCino.

How easy is it to use SimpleImport?

Very easy! Once we created and saved the import mapping, the end user experience was seamless! We have one saved mapping that is used by many users multiple times a day. It’s a key cog within our underwriting process of uploading data.

How long did it take to train your users?

We were able to coincide the implementation of SimpleImport with the go-live of our nCino platform. As a result, we incorporated the training for SimpleImport in our new guides which made for a seamless transition to SimpleImport. This tool was labelled a “win” in multiple training locations during training courses.

How does SimpleImport solve the challenges you had with your process?

At the drag and drop of an Excel file, we’re able to import data from our Excel model into the nCino loan product package in a seamless transition.

The efficiency gained from SimpleImport saves end users from manually entering these data points from point A to point B, reduces data integrity concerns at an effective cost and demands minimal resources to implement and maintain.

How has SimpleImport helped your business and customers?

The saved data mapping is used by our whole credit underwriting team multiple times a day. At FCI, we view SimpleImport as our end solution and feel it best fits into the process as we underwrite credit today. The results through two months are very valuable, as this tool in part helped our credit department underwrite a large Q4 loan demand. Without SimpleImport, this would have negatively impacted loan decision turnaround time with our members and our employee engagement.

Why SimpleImport?

We’ve had no reason to contact Support thus far – which is a good sign as we haven’t had any issues! I’ve started mentioning ProvenWorks and specifically the SimpleImport tool as a solution for anyone who needs to transfer data from Excel to nCino.

We thought our previous system coding in our previous loan origination system was efficient, but the SimpleImport tool was just as efficient if not better as now we can also drag and drop files.

In short, it’s an efficient, cost effective tool that requires marginal training demand and can be used by an individual or a team of users on a frequent or infrequent basis.

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