The Challenge
Running a more efficient private lending business as he scaled
After founding his business, like many lenders, Edwin initially relied upon a combination of spreadsheets, paper documents, and manual workflows to originate and service his loans, but it wasn’t long before the inefficient nature of these processes became an obstacle to scaling his business. The time being spent on each loan file was putting a ceiling on the growth of his business.
After making the original decision to use private lending software to help run his business, Edwin first spent 6 years with another software provider who focused solely on loan origination. After struggling with their software due to bugs and gaps in functionality, and continuously feeling like their team was not responsive to his concerns when he encountered these issues, Edwin decided to look for a new provider. One of the factors that initially drew Edwin towards Baseline was Baseline’s origins as private lenders before our pivot to private lending software, giving us a deep understanding of the industry. During the demo process, it became clear that Baseline’s team knew the business of private lending inside out, which meant we could fully understand his lending use cases and business workflows, something that he felt was in stark contrast to the other vendors he spoke to. Edwin’s takeaway was that Baseline was a platform originally built by private lenders who needed technology that worked for them, instead of a platform built by a software team trying to apply it to private lending without fully understanding it.
The Solution
Allowing Edwin to keep servicing in-house and improve his return on capital
Another key factor in Edwin’s assessment process for new software was ensuring he chose a platform that would allow him to keep his loan servicing in-house, instead of giving up precious margin to a servicing partner. Edwin felt that Baseline’s robust servicing functionality would allow him to easily manage his loan book without relying on a costly external solution. Edwin summed it up like this:
“There’s this disconnect in the industry where people think servicing is a monstrosity of an undertaking, and it’s not. You just need an efficient process. That attracted me to Baseline - a servicing system that’s married to LOS. I didn’t want to spend time sending a bunch of documents and all the information the servicers needed. We’ve recaptured thousands and thousands of dollars since we started using servicing in Baseline 8 months ago. Baseline has paid for itself multiple times over just by being able to keep the servicing in-house”.
The Results
What results did Edwin see with Baseline?
Of the many efficiency gains that Blue Bay realized by switching to Baseline, one of the highest impact came from centralizing all their loan document generation within the platform. By utilizing Baseline’s merge field functionality, Edwin can reference any piece of information stored within Baseline about a loan to seamlessly and instantly generate every document he needs during origination and servicing. This has completely eliminated many of the pain points he felt with his previous software provider, as he no longer needs to extract data from the platform into a separate document, manually edit those documents to add the relevant information, and then send it to the borrower or relevant party via email.
By switching to Baseline, Edwin has also been able to significantly cut down on redundant work and improve the investor experience for the investors in his Blue Bay Fund, allowing him to focus on growing his business. Before using Baseline, Edwin had to invest significant amounts of time in answering repetitive questions from different investors about individual deals, as well as sending out documentation about investment opportunities and collateral to capital investors. Edwin says:
“I have cut my communication down from probably around 3-5 hours per deal, answering questions about loan files, downloading documents, sending those documents out to capital investors via email - 5 hours just on investor communication. We’re now down to 30 minutes per loan file. I can now process many more loans than I could previously.”
Amongst the many efficiency gains empowered by the Baseline platform, a key factor powering this change has been Baseline’s investor portal, which allows your investors access to all the information they might need through the Baseline system, presented in an attractive and easy-to-use format. Edwin says “Capital investors have access to everything on the platform, there’s nothing I need to do on the backend except pickup the phone and have a quick conversation with them - and then it’s a done deal. It’s been a huge time saver for me between me and my capital partners.”
Edwin’s success with Baseline is being repeated by other private lenders with as few as 1 and as many as 1,000+ loans. If you’d like to hear more about Baseline can help you build a better lending business, get in touch via this link.
