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Core banking systems integrate with and have become essential to most of the services modern lending institutions provide. When it comes to loan servicing, your core system is often the conduit through which the essential process of insuring collateral portfolios is performed. Maintaining appropriate insurance coverage is so important that lender insurers have developed high-tech software that interacts with a lender’s core system to facilitate that coverage. With good reason, lending managers and executives are acutely concerned with how well an insurance process will work with the institution’s core system. For that reason, when discussing Blanket Portfolio Insurance, lending executives often ask me the following questions:

May of this year marked the highest rate of inflation in four decades. Consumers are feeling the pain at the pump, the grocery, and when shopping for virtually any good or service. But what impact does record-breaking inflation have on the cost of a property and casualty insurance policy? 

Many of our current customers that have elected to implement blanket insurance to mitigate the risk of uninsured or under-insured collateralized loans did so from some type of insurance tracking program.  Some were tracking internally, and some were outsourcing the function to a third party.  Two questions they all had in common as they considered moving to a blanket program were, “How do we make this switch?” and “What kind of work will be involved on our end?”

Across various parts of the country, community banks and credit unions are experiencing massive overall growth. This has led to faster growth in return on asset ratios, higher net interest margins, and higher loan growth rates. Even with looming economic hurdles on the horizon and talks of an impending recession, executives at these community financial institutions are trying to strike the balance between managing the growth, maintaining operational efficiency, maximizing talent management, and navigating new employee hiring cycles. At an elevated level, let’s focus on this continuous attempt for community lenders to find the balance on these multiple fronts.

Current Environment

If you’ve been following my articles over the last two years, you will know I have agreed with most experts that interest rates would rise at some point in 2020 or 2021. Well, it may not be 2020 or 2021, but to quote a famous line from the 1982 movie Poltergeist, “They’re here.”

In this series on Insurance Vendor Management, we talked about the specialization of the insurance company and the agent,  The 9 Critical Steps for Insurance Vendor Management, the fact that All Policies are Not Created Equal, and Insurance Company Ratings. In this article, we cover Disaster Recovery Plans and Information Security. Let's dive in!