Baker Hill, a leading financial technology provider in delivering solutions for loan origination, risk management, and analytics, today announced its partnership with Harmony Bank. The Dallas-based bank has selected Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate, a preconfigured version of the company’s award-winning Baker Hill NextGen® commercial loan origination system (LOS), which features scalable digital lending capabilities designed for rapid deployment.
Founded in 1901, Harmony Bank is a locally owned and operated bank dedicated to its community, serving customers in Dallas, as well as throughout North and East Texas. Since then, the bank has grown to more than $715 million in assets and 11 branch locations. In addition to the bank’s organic growth, Harmony Bank merged with Texas Brand Bank last year, virtually doubling Harmony Bank’s commercial portfolio overnight. With its larger portfolio and greater ability to lend, Harmony Bank chose to implement Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate to optimize its lending processes. By streamlining commercial lending workflows and automating manual tasks, such as data entry, Baker Hill will empower the bank’s team members to efficiently close more loans and better meet the financing needs of local borrowers.
Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate provides community financial institutions with a world-class framework for digitally transforming the commercial lending process. The solution features the same award-winning LOS features Baker Hill NextGen® is known for, including guided workflows and automated checklists, but with a streamlined implementation timeline of just 90 days. Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate is designed to meet financial institutions like Harmony Bank exactly where they are on their digital transformation journey and scale as their commercial lending needs evolve.
“Our merger was the catalyst that led us to consider a new loan origination system. Prior to our partnership with Baker Hill, our lending process was sufficient, but still manual. We utilized Word and Excel for underwriting, credit memos and exception tracking, leaving us in need of a loan origination platform to help us improve and centralize workflows, which would also help us better define tasks and roles within the lending process,” said Evan Briscoe, Vice President, Senior Portfolio Manager at Harmony Bank.
Briscoe continued, “Shifting away from our existing processes to more efficient, automated commercial lending workflows with a new LOS seemed daunting at first, as deploying a whole new system, configuring it to our institution’s credit policies and training staff is a big undertaking, especially after a merger. Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate addresses these challenges, delivering the efficiency gains that a modern, end-to-end LOS is known for, but designed for faster implementation and greater flexibility to scale as our needs evolve.”
“Community financial institutions like Harmony Bank thrive when their customers and communities flourish. These vital institutions reinvest local dollars back into the community, supporting new job creation and a healthy local economy by providing loans and financing to businesses and the individuals that operate them,” said John Deignan, president and CEO of Baker Hill. “Given the significant role that Harmony Bank serves in financing loans for businesses and commercial enterprises throughout Dallas, choosing the right loan origination solution was an important decision. We are proud this renowned institution chose Baker Hill NextGen® Accelerate, which is built on 40 years of commercial lending expertise. We look forward to supporting Harmony Bank’s continued growth for years to come.”
