Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final month of 2020.
The year’s end that felt like it may never come has finally arrived. And, just like everything else in 2020, it feels a bit different.
December is normally a time of the year when budgeting is wrapped up and attention can turn to the holidays and strategies for the year ahead. But, with a lingering pandemic and an economy that is desperate for further stimulus, lenders instead find themselves in an unprecedented position with no reliable playbook off which to work.
Understanding where you stand in relation to your peers can help you get a better sense of where the industry is headed, help you orient yourself for 2021, and can give you an advantage in planning your next move.
To help facilitate this type of information exchange, we turned this week's Tuesday Q&A Session into an open forum, of sorts, for our attendees.
Joined by nearly 100 banking executives and senior leaders, our insights team shared some feedback we’ve been receiving from the field while also taking the pulse of our lenders through a series of flash polls.
Here are the results.
Prior to the start of our Tuesday Q&A session, we learned of a new stimulus package introduced in the Senate that could potentially pump about $300B into the Paycheck Protection Program. As this new wave approaches, just 18 percent of respondents felt that they were "very prepared" for what's to come.
As the pandemic wears on and lenders begin to refocus on lending outside of PPP, Commercial Real Estate and Business Term Loans/LOCs are the products banks and credit unions will be focused on.
PPP represented the first step into digital transformation for many lenders. In fact, an overwhelming majority of respondents said they don't have a digital application available for business products outside of PPP.
That said, banks and credit unions are determined to change this. In fact 45 percent of respondents said this was very important to their goals in 2021, and 39 percent said it was at least somewhat important.
As Kirk Wycoff, Managing Partner at Patriot Financial Partners, told us in a recent insights session, efficiency will be key to success in 2021. That means overcoming key challenges to loan originations. Here's where the biggest challenges lie for respondents in the year ahead.
For more content like this register for one of our upcoming Insights Sessions.