Nish Modi is Senior Vice President, Digital and Business Intelligence Strategy & Product, for CO-OP Financial Services, a provider of payments and financial technology to credit unions.
This blog was written in partnership with Kyle Fox and Codat.
Since the Paycheck Protection Program’s (PPP) inception in April, lenders throughout the country have scrambled to direct the program’s $660 billion of relief to small businesses in need. With that came challenges — largely driven by lenders’ out-of-date manual processes and overall operational inefficiencies — all of which ring true for the forgiveness process.
The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired tremendous change in every industry. Business leaders faced with a changing workforce and world have had to pivot faster, decide faster, and deliver faster — and at the end of the day, they still have to delight their customers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed gaps in banks’ ability to provide resilient, reliable payment services. Situations where banks could not process payments due to lack of staff access to physical data centers, or because of vendor-imposed downtime due to security breaches, have been all too frequent in the last six months. To address these challenges, banks must replace or augment their legacy systems and move processing to the cloud.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has been a cornerstone of the U.S. government’s relief efforts for small businesses suffering from the economic impacts of COVID-19.
Since the Paycheck Protection Program’s (PPP) inception in April, lenders throughout the country have scrambled to direct the program’s unprecedented $660 billion of relief to small businesses in need. The results have been tremendous: almost 5 million loans originated and 51 million jobs supported, equating to more than 14 years’ worth of small business lending in just a matter of months.
As consumers have adopted third-party digital apps and services to better manage their financial lives, open finance has become a critical digital transformation priority for financial institutions. Today, it’s more important than ever before with almost two-thirds of consumers globally using at least one fintech app and an increased amount of financial activity happening digitally in the midst of COVID-19.
The U.S. government relief programs in response to COVID-19 have put an unprecedented workload on the banking industry. The small business funding programs like Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans and Small Business Administration (SBA) Bridge loans have generated 14 years’ worth of applications in 13 days underscoring the importance of digital transformation.
This post was originally published on the Salesforce blog.
Banking providers around the world are helping millions of people and small businesses manage tremendous financial uncertainty amid COVID-19. Though banks have risen to the challenge with remarkable ingenuity, the crisis underscores the need for them to accelerate their digital transformations.
The success of chief information officers (CIOs) and IT departments in the banking industry is critical to delivering the financial support that’s so desperately needed to withstand the economic impacts of COVID-19.
The unprecedented disruption of COVID-19 has changed how consumers interact with banks; there’s been a 20% increase in digital engagement levels and a halving in the use of cash. Many banks have also needed to rapidly meet the demand for new services such as ‘Interruption Loan Schemes’ to support those hit hardest by lockdown measures and, like many organizations, are operating with a partially remote workforce. Much of this change could remain even after the pandemic;
The global lockdown has forced society to rely more heavily than ever on digital channels in 2020. Those who still preferred face-to-face interaction in a branch setting to the convenience of going online have been forced to adapt and learn new habits. In the financial services sector, UK bank Halifax reported seeing the number of online transactions made by over-65’s doubling during the lockdown, giving one clear example of the extent of this impact.
