Client Portal

5 Ways to Improve Commercial Lending with a Secure Client Portal

Here are 5 ways you can use automated and secure client portals to improve the customer experience within commercial lending.


Financial institutions that manage commercial property deals face the same challenges residential lenders do, only on a larger scale. These deals are often worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and involve the sensitive data of individuals and business entities.  

In 2021, there were 5,250 confirmed data breaches. The financial industry (along with healthcare) has the longest data breach lifecycle – meaning the time it takes to discover the breach and how long it takes to resolve the issue. 

It can take financial firms 329 days to detect and 233 days to resolve compared to 287 days and 80 days in other industries. This is due to the complexities associated with the type of data these firms manage.

Your financial firm must keep data secure. You can do this and simplify the lending process by utilising an automated secure client portal to improve the commercial lending experience. 

What is a Secure Client Portal? 

A secure client portal is a platform that your clients can use to access documents from any device. It offers an additional layer of security and simplicity for file sharing, e-signing paperwork, and uploading sensitive data. Clients can access data through a secure portal and trust that their information won't end up in the hands of cybercriminals. 

You can create a new secure client portal quickly each time you onboard a new client. You can add signature requests, assign document permissions, and switch password protection off and on when needed. 

Moreover, you can add your own branding and logos. You can even add a personal touch to your instruction panels, messaging boards, and alerts and notifications. 

When choosing client portal software, make sure you will get all the features you need from your client portal solution. Things to consider when selecting the right platform include:

  • Is it a cloud-based solution?
  • Does it offer digital signatures
  • Can you and your clients upload and access digital forms?
  • Are there master templates to help save time?
  • Are there chat features, reminders, and due date notification options?

5 Ways to Improve Commercial Lending Experiences with an Automated & Secure Client Portal

Did you know that one in four data breaches transpire through email? Did you also know that 91% of cyberattacks occur from a phishing scam? You can eliminate these threats by moving your document collection for commercial lending deals out of your client's email inbox and into a safe and secure platform. 

Avoiding data breaches and phishing scams are just a few ways to improve the commercial lending experience using an automated secure client portal. How else can you improve your clients' lending experiences? Here’s how.

1. Eliminate Paper from the Paperwork  

Business bankers and loan officers spend hours processing paperwork on every deal they handle. Manually entering financial information is time consuming. Borrowers must submit financial reports sometimes weekly throughout the lending process. 

A secure client portal eliminates the paper in paperwork and digitizes this operation. Clients can enter their financial information into the secure portal, upload documents as needed, and receive notification of their next action to keep the process on track. It can also eliminate the possibility of paperwork getting lost because everything remains in the cloud-based system.

2. Reduce Loan Processing Costs 

Since automation reduces the time it takes to process paperwork, it also reduces costs. Your organisation's business bankers and loan officers spend less time on a single deal, freeing them up to work on more deals at a time, increasing the firm's revenue. 

It also reduces costs by streamlining onboarding and training new hires so that you can bring on more staff to service loans. By saving time and resources, your firm saves money.

3. Cut Processing Time 

A bank can wait as many as 60 days to receive necessary lending documents from a business. Often, this may mean the information on the paperwork is no longer applicable, and the client must resubmit. This adversely impacts the processing time of the loan. 

By automating the lending process with a secure client portal, businesses can upload documents promptly, ensuring the information remains applicable. The loan approval process is reduced to a few hours instead of several days or weeks. 

Learn how one commercial lender slashed document processing times by 64.3% (from 42 days to just 15) in this FileInvite case study.

4. Improve Accuracy

Both the borrower and the lender could potentially cause delays in the lending process by submitting inaccurate data, calculations, and loan analysis. Your firm can reduce errors by using an automated secure client portal. The online software will automatically detect these errors and perform calculations to ensure accuracy and eliminate human errors.

5. Enhance Loan Process Visibility

Loan process visibility means full transparency for the borrower and the lender. This promotes trust and improves the commercial lending experience. Management is also made aware of the nature of all loans processed. That way, they can improve the lending processes and the financial institution's business practices. 

Your financial institution can ensure your team processes loans most efficiently and cost effectively to improve profits, reduce risks, and provide optimal customer service.

Solutions for a Better, More Secure Commercial Lending Process 

At FileInvite, we started right where you are today. Our founder and CEO, James Sampson, launched FileInvite as a document automation platform to help ecommerce websites obtain the photos, files, text, and content clients required for a successful operation. 

However, team members were constantly chasing down clients to collect the data needed. If clients didn't provide the requested files, documents, and information and supply them in the correct order, the data could not be processed. 

We understand your pain points and devised a solution. We launched FileInvite and our secure client portal to help clients avoid the same issues we faced working in the ecommerce sector.

We brought our solution to the financial services industry because we saw the value of protecting the most sensitive data clients provide. We solved our own problems, and now we are here to help you solve yours. 

To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.

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