On May 15, 2025, Zoot will sponsor the Nordic Fintech Summit taking place in Helsinki. Join the pre event webinar How to Transform Your Lending Process on Friday April 14th.
What’s holding your lending business back?
Is it clunky onboarding processes that scare customers away? The inability to respond quickly to market changes or regulations? Or rising marketing costs that just don’t deliver the ROI they used to?
In today’s competitive lending environment, the winners will be the ones who combine great customer experiences, flexible technology, and data-driven strategies to stay ahead. And as the cost of digital marketing climbs, conversion rates will become a critical success factor. If your onboarding experience is outdated or inefficient, you’re not just losing customers—you’re wasting budget.
Lending transformation isn’t just about technology upgrades. It’s about building the foundation for long-term performance.
Conversion Is the New Battleground
In digital lending, customer acquisition is expensive—and getting more so. Platforms like Google reward efficiency. Players with the highest conversion rates win the best ad placements and, increasingly, benefit from preferential pricing. If your onboarding process is riddled with friction and complexity, your cost per acquisition could double.
Consider this: If your bank tells a customer, “We’ll get back to you later,” and half of them never hear back, you’ve effectively doubled your marketing cost per funded loan. And in a world where marketing efficiency directly impacts visibility and competitiveness, that’s unsustainable.
If you can’t convert efficiently, you can’t compete. High drop-out rates don’t just hurt your funnel—they blow up your budget.
Comparison sites and intermediaries often enjoy high conversion rates because they cater to a broad audience and offer multiple products. But they also suffer from high drop-out rates due to long forms and too many input fields. This presents a golden opportunity for lenders. By offering smoother, more personalized onboarding, banks can outperform intermediaries in customer experience and create a powerful competitive advantage.
The Foundation: A Seamless, Data-Driven Customer Journey
A great customer journey starts with removing barriers. Every extra question you ask increases the likelihood that a potential borrower will abandon the process. That’s why shorter, smarter application flows are key—especially when paired with intelligent data integration.
When lenders can automatically access internal and external data sources to pre-fill forms, validate identity, and assess risk in real-time, the result is a faster and more satisfying experience for the applicant. But speed alone isn’t enough.
Strategic decisioning—based on net present value (NPV) rather than just approval likelihood—ensures that lenders grow their portfolios responsibly, maximizing long-term profitability.
Flexible Tech Powers Agility
Legacy systems are one of the biggest barriers to transformation. Many lenders struggle with platforms that are expensive to maintain and too slow to adapt. Every regulatory update, new product launch, or market opportunity becomes a project measured in months—not weeks.
Modern platforms solve this by enabling quick, low-code configuration of decisioning logic, workflows, and integrations. Changes can be tested, refined, and deployed in a fraction of the time, giving lenders the agility they need to stay ahead of competitors and compliant with regulators.
This also gives lenders better control over data usage and costs, allowing smarter alignment between insights and value.
AI’s Role in Faster, Smarter Lending
AI and machine learning won’t replace human oversight in lending—but they’re already accelerating how lenders design, test, and manage their systems.
From suggesting new variables and features to drafting credit model structures, AI tools can speed up onboarding design, model development, and even code generation. While direct deployment of AI-generated models into production is rare (and risky), AI can streamline the pre-production stages—helping teams work faster and more flexibly.
AI also supports fraud detection, document verification, workflow optimization, and the use of alternative data—enabling faster, smarter decisions while improving accuracy, compliance, and the overall customer experience.
Start Small, Scale Smart
The most successful lending transformations don’t start with a massive overhaul. They start with high-impact pain points—like improving onboarding, streamlining access to external data, or refining decision strategies.
From there, transformation can scale into other areas—automating workflows, integrating new services, or consolidating the customer view across products. This phased approach reduces risk, delivers early value, and builds confidence across teams.
And for larger banks, leveraging all internal data to create a single customer view becomes a powerful way to maximize share of wallet and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
The Takeaway: Be Fast, Be Frictionless, Be Ready
Lending transformation isn’t optional—it’s mission-critical. With rising acquisition costs and increasing pressure to deliver seamless customer experiences, lenders need to act now to stay competitive.
By focusing on onboarding, data strategy, flexible tech, and emerging tools like AI, lenders can lower costs, speed up delivery, and convert more leads into loyal customers.
Because in today’s market, the lenders who move fastest—and smartest—are the ones who will win.
AUTHOR
Rune Skånøy, Sales Director at Zoot
Rune is a results-oriented and analytical professional with a passion for delivering business value to clients. Drawing on his deep market knowledge, he helps financial service providers optimize credit strategies, streamline decisioning, and integrate new data sources to drive efficiency and growth.
Zoot
Zoot empowers financial service providers with secure, scalable, and configurable digital lending solutions, enabling them to make faster, more accurate and
risk-aware decisions while ensuring compliance and operational efficiency.
Want to hear more? Join us on May 15th in Helsinki to explore the next chapter in banking, insurance and finance!
