3 Common CRA & Fair Lending Compliance Struggles: Solved
3 Common CRA & Fair Lending Compliance Struggles: Solved
- Blog
- Geo Management Solutions
- August 2022
Staying on top of CRA and Fair Lending compliance is one of the most necessary and difficult tasks banks face today. Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to overstep the bounds of a census bracket without meaning to. This is where accurate tracking and analytics become vital for preventing compliance issues.
Warning: May cause flashbacks for anyone who’s processed HMDA data or generated CRA fair lending reports. (We’re joking… sort of).
Banks are eradicating these fair lending struggles for good
1. Intensive Tracking & Metrics
There’s just so much to keep track of! Between ensuring underwriting compliance to identifying approval rate trends by ethnicity and flagging advertising inconsistencies, compliance departments have their hands full.
Plus, there aren’t a whole lot of useful tools out there to help. We know you’re tired of rigid data software that brings you no closer to identifying recurring trends. Or maybe you pay a crazy amount of money to a consulting company that can’t always predict compliance issues, either… But what else are you supposed to do?
2. Accidental Imbalances
Even with the best intentions, it’s easy to appear to be guilty of compliance issues. Keeping track of every single income bracket, loan contract, and where all your depositors live or bank can be exhausting.
It’s no wonder imbalances occur accidentally. But the CFPB and FDIC aren’t so understanding. Discovering these imbalances during an audit is a risk no bank wants to take.
3. Insufficient Visuals
Whether you’ve been doing a good job or not, how can you tell? How many charts have you tried to generate from a spreadsheet, yet still ended up with problems no one was able to predict?
Even when your bank is, in fact, compliant, proving it can be a headache and a half.
Geo Analytics empowers 100% CRA & Fair Lending compliance
Imagine: every day, you come to work and open an interactive scorecard that displays CRA metrics and high-risk problem areas.
Geo Analytics has already compared every income bracket, census tract, loan approval, APR rate, customer ethnicity, bank advertisement, and more. Every combination of every possible variable has already been analyzed. Plus, the system knows exactly where and who all your information came from.
This is the power of real-time analytics and automated tracking.
Real-time data and automation empowers your team
In a few clicks, you open a territory heat map that highlights any high-risk areas in red. You identify imbalances in a single glance and create a game plan to bring things into balance before the problems become trends.
Plus, you have quick access to data such as regression or statistical significance. Want to know how many standard deviations one group’s average is, compared to the population average? You already have a report for that.
Want to see how many advertisements you’re running in low-income minority areas vs. wealthier zip codes? Done.
Any time a bank’s data changes, your maps and dashboards auto-update to reflect the new information. You always have access to real-time data, and there are no surprises.
If a follow-up action needs to be taken, automated workflows fire off emails and assign next steps to your team so that nothing falls through the cracks. (Yes, there’s a dashboard for that, too!)
You keep up with compliance (and you make it look easy)
When it’s time to generate a report, it only takes a few clicks to export the charts, maps, or raw data you need.
If a senior manager wants an update, you immediately share reports and easy-to-consume snapshots of your current compliance status. Back-and-forth emails and lengthy meetings are a thing of the past because everything is crystal-clear and everyone is on the same page.
There’s no more fear around audits, and no more dread when it comes time to report to the CRA. If an auditor or the CFPB has a question, the answer is right at your fingertips and you can provide it in moments.
Your compliance department is suddenly at the top of its game and is more confident than ever. And it’s all because you leveraged the power of automation with Geo Analytics,
What clients say about Mapline…
“We are a far more efficient company because of this software and has saved us so much money!” – Elizabeth D
“We’re able to pull data and copy/paste it into the program to create simple datasets that allow us to quickly and easily [make decisions]… Easy tracking and planning.” – Taylor A
“I love how simple to use Mapline is. Everything is very intuitive, and the support staff is very helpful too.” – Cameron
“The tools were easy to use but robust enough to give us great information.” – Brian
“Couldn’t be happier. Thanks very much Mapline. Your software and help functionality is fantastic!!” – Alex