Officials with Wilmington-based nCino LLC are optimistic that a new partnership will enhance their customers’ ability to right-price business loans. The partnership between Wilmington-based nCino and Charlotte-based PrecisionLender was announced Tuesday.

nCino, a unit of Live Oak Bank that sells operating software that tracks and streamlines the entire loan life cycle, will now incorporate software from PrecisionLender in the systems it sells to community banks and credit unions.

“The combination of nCino's loan origination tools with PrecisionLender's loan and deposit pricing solution will enhance the overall user experience by enabling lenders to price loans in a safe and intelligent way within the nCino Bank Operating System,” nCino CEO Pierre Naudé said in the announcement.

"We believe that lending is critical to the success of community banks and that the most important conversation a lender has with a borrower is about pricing,” PrecisionLender CEO Carl Ryden said in the news release. “We’re passionate about making that conversation successful for the borrower and the bank. With our pricing solution and the nCino bank operating system, bankers finally have the tools they need to renew their focus on building the strongest possible relationships with their borrowers."

The idea for what is now nCino’s cloud-based operating system was born from Live Oak’s need to manage its far-flung SBA loans and its lending process. Using the Salesforce platform as the basis, the bank developed a software system that would allow it to organize and automate data for each of its loans, from application to payoff. Reporting and dashboard features allowed the lender to track the loan’s progress and status, and assure that the process met regulatory requirements.

In 2012, Live Oak spun off its software unit into a separate division, naming it nCino, a variation on the Spanish word for “oak.” The new division now sells the software to other lenders. The company is expanding rapidly.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the New Hanover Board of Commissioners and Wilmington City Council voted to offer Live Oak Bank a total of $575,000 in incentives to expand its new Tiburon Drive campus with a separate building for nCino. The agreement would provide incremental payments to Live Oak over a five-year period, provided the company invests at least $16 million in new facilities and adds at least 120 jobs paying an average of $80,000.

PrecisionLender is a web-based pricing management product currently used by community banks and credit unions to price a combined total of more than $2 billion in loans and deposits each month, according to company officials.

According to the news release, loan officers can use PrecisionLender “to have a constructive conversation that focuses on the borrower’s needs, and allows them to hand-craft a solution that works for both the borrower and the bank.”