5 minutes
Sponsored by D+H.
“The service we deliver to our members is really important. Having a streamlined and automated commercial lending system helps ensure that they keep coming back to us when they need assistance with future investments—and that is exactly what D+H enables us to do.” – Todd Johnson, VP/business and mortgage lending, Cyprus Credit Union
Going from $100 to Millions
Cyprus Credit Union has never forgotten its humble community origins. Founded in 1928 as a not-for-profit cooperative by 22 Kennecott Copper Company employees with assets totaling less than $100, Cyprus CU is the oldest active credit union in Utah with 18 locations scattered across the Salt Lake Valley serving over 98,000 members.
The area is a high-growth market, and Cyprus CU sees lending, especially commercial lending, as an important part of its business. Today, commercial lending accounts for approximately $85 to $95 million in loan balances and $25 to $30 million in annual loan approvals for the credit union, which has seen growth among new and existing members. “We take great pride in how we service our members, and we see a significant number of referrals coming from them,” says CUES member Todd Johnson, VP/business and mortgage lending at Cyprus CU.
Breaking the Complexity of Manual
Not too long ago, Cyprus CU used informal workflows and rudimentary technology in the underwriting process for all its business lending. “We basically used [Microsoft] Excel and Word,” Johnson recalls. “It was an entirely manual process and nothing was integrated. We used Word templates for documents and Excel templates for credit underwriting.”
Johnson, who joined the credit union in 2008 as business services director and was promoted to vice president in 2010, witnessed the inefficiencies of the lending processes first hand and assumed charge to implement solutions to automate and streamline the manual processes that were tedious and time-consuming. As mortgage lending comprised the biggest opportunity for Cyprus CU’s loan portfolio, the team elected to solve that problem first.
They didn’t need to look very far, having relied upon an enterprise core system from D+H for 25-plus years. “We looked at other mortgage loan origination and point of sale systems,” Johnson notes. “The fact that D+H gives us an end-to-end mortgage lending platform – from loan application, to origination, to servicing – was a highly compelling value proposition.”
Tackling Commercial Lending
With the mortgage lending pieces in place, Johnson and his team turned their attention to commercial lending in late 2014. Again, they evaluated other solution options, but the end-to-end solution from D+H was simply a better choice for some of the same reasons. “We have tighter integration right out of the gate with our enterprise core system,” Johnson says. “Plus, we have out-of-the-box integration between the credit management and document management pieces.”
One of the commercial lending areas where Cyprus CU hoped to expand was Small Business Administration (SBA) loans. But scaling the business using Excel and Word was completely impractical, if not impossible. “We kept track of 25 or 30 loan applications in the approval queue on a whiteboard in my office,” Johnson says. “But this didn’t include the 250 or so loans that we service. Without a better system in place, we were unable to complete annual reviews and unaware of whether members had paid their taxes or insurance. If we wanted to begin taking SBA loan applications, completing the origination for them and then servicing them, we had to move into the digital realm and automate and streamline these processes.”
Making the Audit
Annual audits conducted by the National Credit Union Administration used to be painful for Cyprus CU. It typically took upwards of three weeks to prepare for the audit. Johnson’s entire team of five lending specialists were tasked with preparing files for the audit. “We would stop sales efforts and the processing of loan applications and focus on nothing but preparing files for the audit,” Johnson says. “It was all hands on deck.” This added up to more than 700 staff hours, and this doesn’t account for lost business opportunities during the time the department was essentially closed. Additionally, Johnson estimates that the Cyprus CU team expended more than 80 staff hours remediating audit findings.
Now, with D+H’s credit management and document management solutions in place, Johnson reports that preparing for audits requires one-quarter of the time that it took before. And in the latest audit by NCUA, no areas for remediation were identified. Additionally, credit union staff don’t have to stop selling and processing loans, since only a few staff are required for audit preparation.
Today’s smooth audits are a direct result of a more consistent and complete underwriting process enabled by D+H technology. “With D+H, we can spread financials in a uniform manner,” comments Bennion Gardner, business services manager at Cyprus CU. “It also calculates cash flow in multiple formats. This gives us much greater flexibility and allows us to look at loans from multiple angles and scenarios.”
One of the things Gardner likes the most about D+H is that he can track a loan through its entire lifecycle – from start to finish. “I can see exactly where a loan is at in the approval cycle, the terms and the staff member who needs to approve it,” he explains.
Scaling to the Horizon
In addition to the benefits of end-to-end loan transparency, the Cyprus CU team is also seeing an uptick in loan applications and closures. “We’ve grown the number of loans in the pipeline by 30 to 40 percent,” Johnson indicates. “And we’ve done this without any increase in staff. This can be directly attributed to our deployment of the D+H solutions.”
Being able to deliver an optimized lending experience is important to Cyprus CU. “The service we deliver to our members is crucial,” Johnson sums up. “Having a streamlined and automated commercial lending system helps ensure that they keep coming back to us when they need assistance with future 
investments – and that is exactly what D+H enables us to do.”
