while reviewing, underwriting, approving and funding customer proposals faster and more consistently. Additionally, an increasingly rigorous regulatory environment and escalating reporting requirements have put significant pressure on credit quality while shrinking interest rate margins have necessitated lower operating costs. These trends are forcing the CRE enterprise to more effectively manage information and achieve greater operating efficiencies.

Using CapitalStream’s FinanceCenter, banks and other commercial mortgage institutions are discovering that they can streamline front office processes to improve collaboration, decrease processing times, increase through-put and grow margins with no increase in headcount.

CapitalStream’s FinanceCenter provides a complete front office platform that allows relationship managers, product specialists, credit analysts, appraisers, operations personnel and the various internal and third party service providers to collaborate more effectively to review, gather and analyze information. Your CRE customer-facing team has full, secured access to customer, related party, property, appraisal, financial analysis, legal documentation, insurance, exposure, rate, credit history, balance and other information easily, no matter what system or file contains that information. No more paper files being passed from one desk to another. Now everyone has access to all the information they need with a click of a mouse.

The hardest part of introducing new systems in commercial real estate is getting the front office team to give up their current spreadsheet models and documents. FinanceCenter integrates with current credit write-up documents and cashflow analysis models so your front office team can continue to use these invaluable tools – without having to re-enter information. FinanceCenter extracts, stores, validates and revises the information in these files automatically and then allows management to monitor and analyze information across the entire portfolio. Of course, you can always review and update information directly over the Web.

To close more deals faster, each team member must determine and complete the appropriate steps more quickly. FinanceCenter’s flexible workflow management engine can be configured to map to your business in order to accelerate your process. Using rules-based checklists that are flexible and dynamic, managers can configure the appropriate steps, assignments and controls according to the type of property, structure of financing, size of deal and other criteria. Using a standard Web browser, team members have instant access to the status of each deal and who is doing what and when. By eliminating the hand offs of paper folders from one person to the next, transitions of responsibility from one person to the next are immediate. Moreover, any exceptions or overrides can be tracked along with the associated decision and supporting analysis.

FinanceCenter provides flexible gateways that integrate with your current commercial real estate tools and systems, giving your front office team the access they need to your existing enterprise data warehouses, financial analysis tools, servicing systems and other islands of information. Data that resided in disparate documents, spreadsheets and databases is made available within a secure, Web-based data platform for fast accessibility, continuous updates and real time validation.

The bottom line: your front office team spends more time understanding information and building relationships and less time searching for or re-entering data between documents, spreadsheets and systems.

With FinanceCenter, deal approvals are no longer slowed by out-of-date documents that need to be updated with current information. Word processing documents and spreadsheets are automatically refreshed to incorporate revisions as negotiations progress and as terms and conditions are redefined. The entire front office and all authorized users can easily access all documents and spreadsheets from any point in the underwriting process. An ‘electronic binder’ is created for each deal, eliminating the errors and inefficiencies of paper-based processes.