How Alliant Credit Union Reinvented Its Lending Program

This week, leading trade publication creditunions.com published a full interview with Alliant Credit Union about the success they have had with FICO. You can read the full article here. 

You can also read our media release here

Alliant Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in the United States, has transformed its consumer lending business and is exceeding its lending goals since implementing FICO technology solutions in 2016. With a new consumer loan origination system powered by FICO^® Origination Manager, Alliant has processed 56,000+ loan applications and loaned more than $390 million to members with faster processing. Credit card applications can now close in less than half an hour, and auto loans can be funded the same day.

“As we grew and changed our focus, we needed to give our users access to everything they needed for the loan process without having to talk to anyone,” says Jeremy Pinard, Alliant’s vice president of consumer lending.

Alliant started using the new CLOS for auto loans and credit cards in late 2016. It then added home equity products in October 2017 and RV loans in February 2018. It will start running unsecured loans through the system later this year. The current mortgage and commercial loan systems will remain although there has been some discussion about replacing the latter.

In raw numbers, the credit union has taken more than 72,000 applications through the new origination system and funded more than 28,000 of those applications for more than $500 million. But these numbers are not the only measure of success.

“In our previous system, we were around 25% look-to-book,” Pinard says. “In our new CLOS, we’re up to almost 40% look-to-book in all our consumer lending products combined.”

That’s a pretty efficient rate, even for a credit union that already stands out for its productivity. For example, Alliant serves 774 members per full-time equivalent employee, compared with 385 for credit unions nationwide. And its members, many of them employees of United Airlines, maintain a sharply higher average loan balance than the national average for credit unions — $32,982 versus $15,761, respectively.