The recent announcement that SunTrust’s Wholesale Banking segment is adopting nCino’s Bank Operating System is significant for Wilmington-based nCino, as it signals the company’s move into the large bank market.

SunTrust, a $205 billion-asset institution, will deploy the Bank Operating System to about 3,000 SunTrust employees in sales, risk and operations departments, according to a recent news release.

“SunTrust is an early adopter of nCino, and we’re starting to roll the program out to our teammates,” said Sandra Spiers, the bank’s Wilmington city president and senior vice president. “We were impressed by the opportunities for both our teammates and clients in terms of speed and consistency – it’s a game changer in the financial industry.”

Atlanta-based SunTrust expects the nCino product “to provide an additional competitive edge for its commercial lending capabilities by enabling the bank to make faster decisions and provide faster funding to its clients,” the release stated.
“nCino’s cloud-based architecture is an extension of the bank’s vast Salesforce. com platform enabling more meaningful customer interactions and engagement. As a result, SunTrust expects to improve efficiency, productivity and collaboration while emphasizing its client-first culture.”

“When clients apply for credit, they want two things,” Pam Kilday, senior vice president and head of operations at SunTrust, said in the release. “They want a fast decision and secondly, they want money in their hands as quickly as possible. We believe the nCino platform will provide SunTrust an added advantage in terms of speed to market.”

SunTrust officials believe that this major upgrade to its financial technology will give it a competitive edge in offering commercial loans.

In a Nov. 11 American Banker story on SunTrust’s adoption of nCino’s product, authors Bryan Yurcan and Robert Barba stated, “The company [SunTrust] was tired of the antiquated system it had and didn’t like losing out to marketplace lenders, which could beat it on closing and funding loans.”

Spiers said she is looking forwarding to having the Bank Operating System as a tool to both streamline the lending process and to attract new commercial customers.

“There is an industry disconnect between how a consumer completes a loan and how it closes with a business. This platform helps bridge that gap by delivering a differentiated experience to businesses through a faster and more informed loan process,” she said.

nCino’s Bank Operating System is built on the Salesforce.com platform, which SunTrust already uses for its customer relationship management system. With the purchase of nCino’s product, the bank will have its entire Wholesale Banking segment on a common platform, unifying functions such as commercial loan origination and document management, the release stated.

This is important to SunTrust’s business goals, Spiers said.

“One of our values at SunTrust is precision, and the nCino platform only enhances our detailed-oriented process,” she added. “This is not only important for us, but for the client, who expects a seamless experience when closing a loan.”

In their American Banker article, Yurcan and Barba note that nCino’s deal with SunTrust is “another example of [nCino’s] move upstream.”

Through its initial efforts to market to community banks and credit unions, it has built a base of more than 100 financial institutions, according to nCino’s website. Of those, 20 have more than $1 billion in assets, including SunTrust as well as Regions Bank ($125 billion), Bank of the West ($74 billion) and Eastern Bank ($9.9 billion), the website states.