Independent Banker - July 2019 - 67

Power Lending
Partners
Millennium Bank increases loan volume
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When John Hatfield joined Millennium Bank in Ooltewah,
Tenn., in 2014 as a credit analyst, he quickly learned that the
bank's origination process' inconsistencies led to varying
credit analysis results. Compounding a free-form lending
process was a spreading tool with limited capabilities that
was " clunky " and provided inconsistent outputs, according
to Hatfield.
This process led to inefficiencies and wasted time as lenders
had to wrangle all necessary documents for big and small
To standardize and improve the credit process, Millennium
Bank streamlined access to data for the life of the loan by
investing in Abrigo for credit analysis, risk rating and loan administration.
The
Electronic Tax Return Reader (ETRR) has further eliminated
the need to input all of the information from tax returns, as
all fields from a digital tax return document are automatically
entered into the Abrigo system. ETRR has made their lenders
more diligent in obtaining digital copies of tax returns and uploading
these documents ahead of submitting applications
for review. " The output is only as good as the data that everyone
collects, " says Osborne. She credits the ability to upload
documents directly into the program with improvements in
data quality and a streamlined data-collection process.
Hatfield points to several instances in which all financial documents
were uploaded and entered into Abrigo before the
request even hit his desk. For those loans, Hatfield is able to
fully underwrite the deal, ask the lender questions, put together
a credit memo along with the financial analysis, and
then place them back in his folder on the network drive,
ready for him to finalize, all within a few hours.
As a community bank, many of the loans that Millennium
Bank turn around are under $500 thousand without a lot of
complexity. With Abrigo, the bank saw big efficiency gains in
their smaller deals, allowing Hatfield and Osborne to focus
their efforts on the more complex deals, which have also improved.
opportunities
alike. " As a small community bank in a town
that has a lot of regional banks, and because we are not always
the price leader on rates, we have to find other ways to
compete. I think one of the biggest ways we compete is our
speed to market, " says Hatfield.
Identifying credit analysis as an area of focus, Hatfield and
his colleague Eve Osborne-who together complete 100%
of the credit analysis at Millennium Bank-rolled up their
sleeves.
Improved quality and turnaround time have sparked referrals
from happy clients, and loan officers at Millennium Bank
have increased loan production by 25%, while the institution
as a whole has grown from $81 million in loans to $125 million
in less than two years, without adding a single lender to the
team.
abrigo.com / Phone: 888-201-2231
12331-B Riata Trace Parkway, Building 4 Suite 200, Austin, TX 78727
http://www.abrigo.com
Independent Banker - July 2019

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