Double digit rates of growth in lenders' Commercial Real Estate (CRE) portfolios over the past decade show no signs of abating. As the market expands and matures, customers become more sophisticated - demanding new product offerings, better service, faster turnaround.

Nor has this growth gone unnoticed by Boards of Directors or regulators, who want more information more quickly about risks, concentrations, and exposure.

The reality is that antiquated systems keep lenders from maximizing their time developing new business and achieving revenue goals. Rather, they are spending up to 80% of their time servicing current accounts, chasing paperwork, and resolving errors. And CRE Line of Business executives are less effective at managing their business because they have to spend too much of their time finding and compiling information about their business.

	Can you answer your Board's regulators questions about portfolio characteristics, risk profiles, pricing, and exposure?
	Can you demonstrate that the CRE line of business is adequately protected against losses if the market takes a downturn?
	Do you know whether your organization is being fairly and competitively compensated for the level of risk you are taking?
	Do you have a way of consistently administering credit and pricing policy?
	Do you have the resources (time, money, people, systems) to service specialized CRE loans to your customers' satisfaction?

Already at the forefront of CRE lending applications, AFS has invested heavily in the development of new capabilities that reduce the need for the Line of Business to provide servicing and information while improving enterprise control of risks and pricing.

AFS' Commercial Real Estate takes care of the back office servicing and information needs of the business so lenders can spend their time developing business opportunities and generating revenue. It automates administration of lender credit and pricing policies, and provides the information needed by management to effectively mitigate risk and improve profitability.

What Differentiates the AFS Commercial Real Estate Solution

AFS offers the only COMPLETE solution for Commercial Real Estate. It automates the origination process with workflow management customized to reflect and monitor your organization's policies and procedures for loan approval and booking. It provides the most functionally rich loan servicing capabilities available today, enabling you to efficiently support virtually any type of real estate loan. It identifies loans for securitization based on your criteria, pools them, and executes the transfer of the loans and all related notifications. It provides Web-based real-time, online access to account status for superior customer care. And it provides portfolio, managerial, and regulatory reporting.

AFS offers the only system that's fully integrated so it eliminates the operational risks of manual and systems "hand-offs" that can cause delays to customers, data discrepancies, and errors. This integrated approach virtually eliminates data quality issues.

AFS staff has the most in-depth domain expertise. AFS Professional Services staff has completed hundreds of system conversions from virtually every competitor and many internally developed lending systems. Their knowledge of best practices ensures faster implementation and more effective training and deployment.

Only AFS provides a customized delivery that replicates your organizational reporting hierarchy, lending policies and procedures, commercial real estate products, customer relationships, reporting needs, and securitization criteria.

AFS is the market leader in commercial lending, with 70% market share among the top 25 U.S. banks. Its core competency is built on over 35 years of experience with the country's top lending institutions.

If you want to differentiate your Commercial Real Estate lending capabilities, look to AFS.

The AFS Straight-Through Process
Integration of the Commercial Real Estate lending process with the existing AFS lending platform combines the advantages of specialized lending capability with Straight-Through Processing and eliminates the need for specialty niche real estate systems.

Only AFS offers the ability to automate the credit process from application through asset sale or payoff to enable single-source, end-to-end tracking, servicing, management information and exception reporting. End-to-end servicing capability reduces manual data collection and errors, improves risk management and control, and increases customer satisfaction and retention. Lenders spend less time on account servicing and can focus on generating loans. Integration of the lending platform enables standardization of policies, processes, and procedures across the enterprise for consistency and control.

AFS Commercial Real Estate Features
Origination — Captures the information a lending institution needs to make a credit decision and streamlines workflows to ensure loan requests are routed to the right people with the right data. Provides faster turnaround, and gives management unprecedented control of the entire process. Ensures compliance with bank credit, pricing, and documentation policy. Identifies and categorizes loans subject to securitization.

Servicing — Provides a system of record for loans, including relationship structure, terms and conditions, transaction history, loan collateral, covenants, and documentation. Automates the calculation of complex principle, interest, fee, and escrow processing requirements. AFS' integrated Construction Lending module automates tracking of completion status and disbursements relative to draw schedules for commercial and residential construction projects.

Portfolio Management — Pools and values loans for securitization. Automates distribution of required information and documentation to syndication and securitization participants and to regulatory agencies. Executes fund transfers subject to conditions of sale.

Loan Administration — Provides real-time, online access to account status at any point in the lending process from origination through loan payoff or asset sale.

Management Information — Provides on-demand portfolio management reporting and analytic capabilities delivered by AFS and available via secure Web access.

Regulatory Considerations
Both the Basel Committee and U.S. Federal bank and thrift regulatory agencies have issued guidance directing institutions with material exposures in Commercial Real Estate to maintain and analyze a much broader, deeper data set to determine current and future regulatory capital requirements and to employ heightened risk management practices. Among them:

	The ability to analyze project financial strength, market conditions, financial ratios, advance rates, project resources, contingencies, liability structure, cash flow predictability, asset characteristics, strength of developer, and asset quality
	The ability to control loan disbursements to ensure that they do not exceed actual development and construction costs
	The ability to document construction progress and the inspection process
	The ability to track presales and preleasing
	The ability to maintain the appraised value at origination as well as subsequent valuations
	The ability to track and report exceptions to underwriting standards
	The ability to identify and manage concentrations of credit, including the ability to segment by property type, geographic area, tenant industries, risk ratings, loan structure, loan type, loan-to-value ratio, and debt service

Does your commercial real estate lending system have these capabilities?