Posts by Joel Pruis

Joel Pruis is a senior business consultant with Experian’s Global Consulting Practice. Pruis is dedicated to delivering programs to his clients that increase productivity and profitability and provide financial services organizations with the tools to gain a competitive advantage in the ever-changing market. He has more than 22 years of experience in origination and portfolio management for small business and commercial credit originated via credit scoring and/or judgmental criteria, process management for small-business lending and commercial lending across all levels of exposure.

 
Pruis matches these techniques and processes for the business purpose of underwriting and portfolio management within the appropriate segments and balances operational efficiencies with accurate risk identification.
 
He advises clients that commercial lending is not separate from other types of lending and that the industry is moving forward from the days when it was thought to be too unique to be analyzed , assessed or reengineered in any form. His successful counsel to clients is to be open to having their lending practices analyzed because this type of assessment is the only way to improve operations going forward.
 
Prior to joining Experian, Pruis was an Adjunct Professor at Indiana Wesleyan University and a small-business banking manager at First Indiana Bank.

What is commercial lending workflow and why is it important?

The commercial lending - traditional C&I, CRE and other - segment is one of the last areas to be “automated” or captured within an automated lending platform.   Many of us talk about the need to automate this segment but the discussion needs to start with the question of “What does it mean to...read more

Application auto-decisioning: Misconceptions and proper Use

From a score perspective we have established the high level standards/reporting that will be needed to stay on top of the resulting decisions.  But there is a lot of further detail that should be considered and further segmentation that must be developed or maintained.   Auto Decisioning A...read more

How to create decision strategies for small business lending

Some of you may be thinking finally we get to the meat of the matter.  Yes the decision strategies are extremely important when we talk about small business/business banking.  Just remember how we got to here though, we had to first define: Who are we going to pursue in this market segment? How are...read more

Underwriting and Data Requirements/Guidelines

  One might consider this topic redundant to the last submission around application requirements and that assessment would be partially true.  As such we are not going to go over the data that has already been collected in the application such as the demographic information of the applicant and...read more

Small Business Application Requirements - part II

- by Joel PruisApplication Requirements: Financials or No Financials – That is the question! Probably the first debate with information requirements is whether or not to collect financial statements on the business.  There has been much heartburn by the commercial lending traditionalists with the...read more

Small Business Application Requirements - part I

- by Joel Pruis The debate on what constitutes a small business application is probably second only to the ongoing debate around centralized vs. decentralized loan authority (but we will get to that topic in a couple of blogs later).  We have a couple of topics that need to be considered in this...read more

Getting Back in the Game – Generating Small Business Applications

  Just to recap from Part I – The $500 million to $20 Billion asset size financial institution lost significant ground from 2006 to 2010 while those with assets greater than $20 billion held steady and those smaller than $500 million and the credit unions improved significantly. Also, the focus...read more

Getting Back in the Game – Generating Small Business Applications

Part I – New Application Volume:Generating small business or business banking applications may be one of the hottest topics in this segment at this time. Loan demand is down and the pool of qualified candidates seems to be down as well. Trust me, I am not going to jump on the easy bandwagon and...read more

Small Business Market Segmentation Strategies

-by Joel Pruis Basic segmentation strategy for business banking asks the following questions: - Is there a uniform definition of small business across the industry? - How should small business be defined?  Sales size of the applicant?  Exposure to the financial institution? - Is small...read more

As the Pendulum Swings: Small Business Lending

- by Joel Pruis  No, it is not another soap opera but more of a search for the center, the balance that is needed for excellence in execution in the small business lending segment.   While much attention over the past few years has been paid to the mortgage crisis, the small business segment has...read more