Imagine this scenario: You’re almost there. You’ve reconciled ‘amount requested’, compared documents, triple-checked line items, and made sure all lien waivers were properly classified. You even ran through your list of loan covenants to ensure compliance and mitigate risk. Best of all, you managed to do all those things FASTER than your borrower expected. The last thing you need is an approval. You dropped a note on your coworker’s desk this morning and even sent a follow-up email at lunch. No reply. Unfortunately, your coworker is busy on a project, hasn’t seen your request and every minute that goes by your borrower’s satisfaction goes down.

The odds are you’ve experienced the pain of waiting for approvals many times. Approvals are an important part of ensuring loan quality and reducing risk, but they also introduce huge amounts of inefficiency. To make approvals more efficient, start by documenting every part of your process that requires an approval. First, validate the approval is actually necessary and then look at which parties are involved. Next, centralize the approval workflow in the same place that other activities happen.