Reimagining commercial loan origination with LaserPro Evaluate
The underwriting spine: how LaserPro Evaluate orchestrates modern corporate lending
Banks and credit unions need to reduce loan documentation costs while maintaining regulatory compliance, and they want to achieve these goals as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
Corporate customers drive this need by expecting the same seamless experience they receive in their personal financial lives.
With this in mind, Finastra is reimagining its market-leading LaserPro Lending Platform, which includes LaserPro Evaluate, as a cloud-native, SaaS solution designed to modernize commercial loan origination for banks and credit unions.
The new version streamlines workflows, reduces manual processes, and enables faster, compliant, and data-driven lending with a consistent user interface, supporting end-to-end automation in conjunction with the broader LaserPro Lending Platform.
A long history of providing lending solutions
To understand the position of LaserPro in the lending marketplace and how it will develop in the future, it helps to understand how Finastra has served financial institutions to date, says Nate Kochanski, Senior Product Manager, Finastra.
“We know this sector because we’ve been building lending systems for decades, right back to the 1980s,” Kochanski explains. “We’ve learned a lot along the way, including what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work. When we wanted to build a version for the cloud, we didn’t simply ‘lift and shift’ but reimagined what the new system could look like.”
Notably, this thinking involved looking at the user experience first and foremost, as well as making sure that Finastra builds scalable, modern systems on the back-end. Finastra designed the platform to suit different user personas, many of whom need to carry out processes without technical expertise.
“If you’re a decision-maker and you log into the platform once a week or once a fortnight, you don’t need to be a system expert,” Kochanski says. “If your primary job is sending a loan to LaserPro, you don’t need to be a system expert.”
Choosing a modular, API design
As well as making the new version of LaserPro Evaluate, along with other components such as LaserPro Exchange and LaserPro Analyzer, user‑friendly, Finastra focused on ensuring the system is modular, giving organizations the option of choosing which components to implement and integrate by using open application programming interfaces (APIs).
“The entire platform is built with APIs, which means we can build it safely, build it more rapidly — and achieve really strong uptimes,” explains Kochanski. “It also makes the platform extensible, because it becomes really easy for us to connect to third-party systems or other internal applications.”
The benefits of modularity extend to modernizing other lending systems with the same standard microservices, saving time and resources by building multiple product lines on a single platform. In time this design could be used for consumer lending as well as corporate loans, all without creating new components.
Finastra started this modernization process with LaserPro Analyzer, a financial spreading system that was a relatively lightweight, internal system to take on first.
“We wanted to make sure that we were hitting the mark from a technology standpoint, as it was fairly early days for multi-tenant, software-as-a-service systems,” recalls Kochanski. “We needed to test, configure, and support the new version of LaserPro Analyzer, and make it easy for banks to be up and running with an out-of-the-box configuration within five to ten minutes.”
The importance of LaserPro Evaluate, and how it works
The development of LaserPro Exchange, which enables document routing to and from LaserPro, came next, and is now followed by LaserPro Evaluate, which is the coordination and underwriting component of the entire platform – or as Kochanski describes it, the spine that connects everything together:
“LaserPro Exchange is essentially all of your underwriting components, loans, collateral, relationships, decisioning, and LaserPro integration. And it provides all of that via a very intuitive user interface. We don’t want banks to have to put on a training event every time a new hire comes in.”
As well as focusing on the different personas using LaserPro Evaluate, the development team at Finastra has ensured that data is structured in a way that it can easily interact with different lending systems and also enable future growth.
One example of enabling future growth is LaserPro Evaluate’s ability to absorb new technologies, notably artificial intelligence (AI), adds Kochanski: “The system is structured in order to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, making it future ready.”
While LaserPro Exchange is ready to use out-of-the-box, it is also highly configurable in terms of screen layout and labelling. Users access all of the records and documents they need to do their job, including loans for decisioning, corporate entities, collateral and risk profiles.
“The data points you’ll see in LaserPro Evaluate correspond very closely to what LaserPro is expecting, which means documentation is more likely to be right the first time, versus having to go back and forth between analysts, the document preparation team and lenders,” Kochanski says.
What LaserPro Evaluate means for lenders
LaserPro Evaluate provides a simple, more cohesive underwriting and loan origination experience for banks, which limits the re-keying of data and bouncing between different systems.
“Our overarching vision is to build a system that you log into when beginning your day and log out at the end, without having to move from one application to another,” states Kochanski. “Our plan is to start branching into consumer lending and to use some of the same concepts from LaserPro Exchange, whether that is making loans, identifying collateral or managing data about borrowers.”
Other future plans include a more transparent borrower experience, where customers can check on the status of their loans, or receive prompts when they need to submit documents.
“LaserPro Exchange is advancing commercial lending right now, but we will be reusing a lot of the same components for consumer lending, which will require a slightly different user experience,” Kochanski predicts. “It will require more of a straight through application than commercial lending.”
Finastra is also considering how it will apply AI in future versions of LaserPro Evaluate, says Kochanski. “At the moment you have two different categories of AI. The first includes large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT or Copilot, then you have agentic AI, which involves software agents carrying out jobs on a platform.”
An example of agentic AI is when a system translates handwritten applications into data and feeds it into a core system or otherwise validates data in an application.
“It’s taking a lot of friction out of processes, but I don’t see it moving up to the next level and taking over credit evaluations in corporate lending,” adds Kochanski. “AI is currently probabilistic rather than deterministic, and that won’t change in the near future.”
Overall, concludes Kochanski, LaserPro Evaluate is all about simplifying and accelerating the lending process. “When you look at document preparation, LaserPro Exchange covers about 60% to 70% of data points that are needed to produce a LaserPro document and depending on what the loan is for and who is involved, that percentage can get even higher.”
As financial institutions continue to compete with non-bank lenders for both corporate and consumer business, pressure will also keep building to remove friction in processes, improve the customer experience and reduce costs. LaserPro Evaluate provides the spine that will support lenders’ platforms both now and in the future.
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