AFS Lender Workstation
One of the primary advantages of AFS' integrated lending platform is that it provides a single source of comprehensive transaction level data across all lending lines of business (consumer, commercial, specialized assets, and capital markets). The AFS Lender Workstation leverages the value of this integrated database as the source for consolidated management information delivery throughout the lending enterprise. AFS Lender Workstation provides powerful insight into portfolio activity, pricing, industry concentration, total customer and market segment exposure, credit exceptions, runoff, and revenue leakage to facilitate well-informed business decisions that fuel growth, optimize yield, and manage lending risk.

Business Issues
Growth in size and diversification of assets, increased demands for transparency, new and impending regulatory requirements, and expanded geographical footprints are just a few of the major industry trends that are placing ever growing pressure on banks to improve and expand their information delivery capabilities.

Most legacy lending systems, designed for the purpose of loan accounting, have proven ill-equipped to provide the information needed to effectively manage credit risk, grow revenue, monitor staff productivity, or improve customer profitability. Internally developed information systems and data warehouses are a testament to the banking industry's attempts to address the various aspects of this problem, which typically center around:

Data Integration: Through the years, most banks have expanded their product offerings by adding incremental specialty lending systems. Having multiple disparate loan accounting systems makes it difficult to bring the information together to manage the entire loan portfolio or customer relationship, or to quantify total exposure.

Data Quality: Underlying data discrepancies, often associated with the integration of disparate lending databases from unique systems or lines of business, may include formatting issues, data redundancy, incomplete data elements, conflicting data entries and inconsistent use of data fields.

Timeliness: Data updates require significant manual intervention and occur only periodically, limiting their value in making time-critical decisions and mitigating credit risk.

Consistency: On an enterprise basis, different results are reported from different lending or information systems, resulting in reconciliation issues and a lack of credibility.

Access: Information is not readily available to each of the constituencies that need it (e.g., line, operations, finance, risk management, credit review) or in a form that is conducive to their unique information requirements.

Improve Productivity/Efficiency
By eliminating time consuming requests for information, pinpointing issues requiring attention, and streamlining information exchange, AFS Lender Workstation improves throughput. The system enhances the productivity of relationship managers by assembling the information they need to manage risk, including early identification of problem loans, credit concentrations, total customer exposure, and risk rating changes-all contributing to revenue enhancement. In addition, AFS Lender Workstation eliminates the significant costs of internal database development, updates, maintenance, and information delivery.

Mitigate Credit Risk
The system supports proactive risk management through reporting on indicators such as non-accruals, risk-rating distributions, and industry concentrations, as well as providing unlimited user-defined ad hoc views of the data to target specific credit quality warning signals.

The AFS Lender Workstation provides the ability to monitor the components of risk (risk ratings, tenor, collateral) and return (spread, fees, and base rates) to identify exceptions and optimize the financial institution's compensation for the level of risk it incurs.

Increase Revenue
AFS Lender Workstation's sales and business development reporting enhances revenue by identifying business opportunities, providing input to pricing decisions, measuring relationship contributions, and optimizing the risk/return tradeoff.

AFS Lender Workstation enables bankers to price deals by comparing them with similar credit facilities within their own portfolios; to analyze the performance and risk profiles of a group of loans defined by any number of parameters; and to determine a loan's profitability.

Information is filtered to identify which organizational units, groups of customers, or credit products are more profitable for the organization. The system also provides the ability to drill down into the detail to determine the underlying causes of performance.

A particular strength of AFS Lender Workstation is its ability to analyze fees-identifying the impact of fee waivers and exceptions and modeling the impact of new or changed fees on the existing customer base-all of which results directly in increased revenue.

The AFS Lender Workstation Delivery
By delivering AFS Lender Workstation on an Application Service Provider (ASP) basis, AFS takes responsibility for populating, maintaining, and refreshing the comprehensive reporting database drawn from a financial institution's legacy lending system(s). The requirement for use of in-house programming resources is negligible.

Reporting is customized to reflect a client's unique organizational structure, enabling management to drill down from the holding company level to obtain consolidated information on separate corporate entities, lines of business, regions, market segments, sales groups, relationship managers, and individual credit facilities.

With data security at its core, AFS has developed a process for initializing a bank's Lender Workstation database and for regularly updating it. Initial data set-up is validated by bank staff. Thereafter, Lender Workstation database updates are automated and routine.

Typically, banks using AFS Lender Workstation transmit raw data extracts from their loan accounting system(s) to AFS via a secure data exchange established between the bank and AFS. Automated data feeds can be processed by AFS as frequently as bank management considers appropriate for its own analytic purposes: monthly, weekly, or daily. Most clients opt for weekly or monthly transmissions.

Once received, AFS extracts the data required for Lender Workstation, runs it through several automated validation programs to ensure its viability, converts it to the appropriate formats, processes it, and populates Lender Workstation with the bank's updated data.

Access to Lender Workstation is provided through a secure Web browser. Bank users authenticate to the system from their desktops using password identification and obtain access to client-defined levels of information and reports. Bankers can access pre-defined reports and/or query the database to customize information retrieval by a wide variety of data parameters.