A recent IDC survey found that 46% of financial service respondents feel they receive data in an unusable format. 47% said that integrating systems is a problem.

This concern is shared by analysts throughout the US banking sector. For lenders, unstandardized data increases the time required for manual quality assurance. Although most financial data portals claim to accelerate processing by improving data visibility and accessibility, they often depend on borrower uploads such as PDFs or spreadsheets, with no assurance of content quality. The primary limitation on ROI is data validation, which is frequently overlooked in portal efficiency reports.

If your borrowers continue to upload PDFs, your process is not fully automated. Instead, you have a digital inbox that still demands significant manual effort.

UX-friendly portals vs. decision-ready data

Portals aren’t your enemy. They provide an easy-to-use interface for common slowing points like receiving, logging, and somewhat organizing the data a borrower sends you. They also show some level of status visibility, although that visibility isn’t always as helpful as it first appears.

Most portals notify you when data uploads are complete. While this is useful, it can create a false sense of completion. Lenders need to know when data is standardized, comparable, and audit-ready before it can be effectively used.

Your current portal might be easy to use, but that doesn’t give top-tier banks a competitive edge. It’s earned by eliminating the manual middleman.

Why PDFs keep the manual back office alive

Where portals may not be your enemy, unregulated PDFs pose significant data quality risks. That’s because even perceptively simple documentation tasks still produce meaningful error rates. Gartner’s 2023 Banking Operations Report found a 0.5-1% error rate for manual data entry in financial institutions, with each error costing around $125 to correct.

Reducing reliance on these inputs might seem obvious, but unstructured data, such as documents, PDFs, and emails, is still the most common format for data storage.] The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency estimates over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured or semi-structured, with lending operations being one of the most document-intensive.

However, this offers a tangible opportunity to enhance your competitive offering. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg recently revealed that just 3% of banks fully automate the underwriting of some small-business loans, and only 5% allow borrowers to complete the end-to-end loan process online. For what may be a short window, there’s a significant opportunity for your bank to outstrip the market in speed and quality of service – if you can successfully automate your lending process with high-quality standardized data.

How to measure the ROI of your current lending-data system

You can begin assessing your data input quality by monitoring what occurs after borrowers upload their data.

We suggest measuring throughput by comparing the number of documents received against when spreading is complete. Further this by recording the average number of deals analysts complete every month.

Costs per application is another metric you’ll want an eye on. Also labour costs, including hours spent on extraction, rekeying and reconciliation.

Lastly, tracking rework rates, exception volumes, and audit trail completeness will highlight your exposure to risk.

How Validis fuels your portal with decision-ready data

You do not need to invest in an entirely new portal. Instead, focus on obtaining clean, decision-ready data to maximize your portal’s value. The Validis process is straightforward.

First, where possible Validis connects directly to your existing accounting platforms to pull general ledger, AR/AP data, trial balances, financial statements, and other relevant metadata. We support counts for 80% of the U.S.’s most popular software, but if we can’t connect directly, structured upload paths like guided provide a second alternative.

We then standardize the data before it reaches your analysts, converting borrower-specific financials into comparable formats. This enables your bank to use a consistent system across industries, company sizes, and accounting platforms.

Validis automatically identifies and resolves inconsistencies and missing data before they reach your underwriting team. Any exceptions are flagged for your team to review and address.

Finally, we deliver decision-ready data directly into your existing portal, so your analysts can continue working within their current workflow.

Learn more about why portals alone don’t transform lending

We have developed a comprehensive guide identifying financial data bottlenecks in traditional portals and how lenders can address them.

Access the guide