Kyle Kuhn
What fills the gap are small configuration decisions made by people solving immediate problems. Routes get added, workarounds become permanent and lenders get frustrated. It isn't anyone's fault. It's what happens over time without dedicated expert oversight.
Why Does nCino Knowledge End Up Sitting with One Person?
From a talent perspective, it's generally a battle of attrition. They have larger teams, so they need to keep backfilling people as they move on. They tend to have resourcing nailed or strategies already in place.
The problems come more when you get into smaller community banks. A lot of them went live several years ago and nCino tends to sit on the business side, perhaps with a chief credit officer sponsoring the project and an admin supporting it.
After three or four years, that accidental admin can't keep up or moves on. That leaves all the legacy knowledge on the business side with nobody really there to handle it. Workarounds start to come up because people are making decisions to fix problems now, not for the future.
Where Does the Frustration Show Up for Lenders?
One of the standard examples we see is credit memo templates. A credit analyst may only be looking at the five or six things the bank cares about, but there can be 14 or 15 things that need to be filled in. People start tracking outside Salesforce or nCino because it becomes a pain for them to do more admin.
Then there are things like Book to Core and Automated Spreading, which are functionalities nCino has. If the bank isn't compliant or running at Gold Standard, it isn't able to use them. That slows down the deal process and frustrates the people using the system.
It's taking too long, people have to track outside the system because new functionality isn't on, or the system has been configured in a way that isn't user-friendly. It may have been user-friendly before, but the bank has grown or gone through a merger or acquisition and now needs different checks and balances. The system might not be built for purpose anymore.
What Do Manual Workarounds Tell You About the Platform?
It's not the platform that has a capability gap. It's generally an execution gap. nCino is built for purpose and can be configured so teams don't have to do those things outside it.
The best centers of excellence have 90% to 100% adoption and everybody is using the platform, apart from perhaps one begrudging loan officer who still does things the old-school way. The problem comes when there isn't enough oversight to configure the system around what lenders need. It's usually a personnel issue.
With nCino now operating a monthly release cadence, there are new things to address while the bank is still trying to unwind the metaphorical knot created inside the UI. An admin may knock off one or two things a month, but another three or four are added. You end up chasing your tail.
What Separates An nCino SME From a Salesforce Administrator?
nCino is built on Salesforce, so there are a lot of similarities, but nCino has a complex data structure and is intrinsically different. A Salesforce admin can absolutely learn nCino and get effective, or get dangerous, at it.
The issue is that they may not have the banking exposure or understand credit, loan operations and what goes into closing a deal from a loan perspective. It may not be a technical deficiency. It comes down more to understanding the loan cycle and what lenders actually want.
A Salesforce admin may not know the five, six or seven things a credit team wants to see on a credit memo. They can fix configuration issues that are fine technically but don't lead to quicker business outcomes. It needs to be business-driven, with a tech team there to support it, rather than tech-driven.
What Can a Specialist nCino SME Change in Six Months?
We recently placed a specialist nCino SME into a community bank with 24 known platform issues. The bank had broken configurations, manual workarounds, covenant servicing sitting in spreadsheets and functionality it was paying for but hadn't turned on.
The program started with a full audit and a six-month remediation roadmap agreed with the bank's leadership. The first phase addressed the configuration problems creating the most immediate friction, including exposure calculations, email notifications, branch selection, duplication rules and unused routes.
Once the core environment had been stabilized, the specialist moved into the larger build work. A customer portal was deployed so borrowers could upload documents directly into nCino, Covenant Servicing went live, AG risk rating was rebuilt and the bank's approval processes and credit memo templates were updated.
The remaining work covered DocMan and DES, Smart Checklist, Fee Management, Third Party Tracking, Product Catalog, Householding and automated loan number generation. Excel-based reporting was then replaced with a live pipeline report, exception report and management dashboard.
All 24 issues were resolved within six months. More than 40 unused fields were hidden, redundant routes were removed and branch-related load-time errors were eliminated. Borrower document collection saved approximately three hours per loan file, Ag credit work fell from eight hours to four, credit memo preparation time dropped by 40% and average approval cycle time was reduced by 28%.
The program was completed on time and cost 40% less than using an nCino systems integrator. It closed with Priority Manager activated, Gold Standard restored and full documentation handed over to the bank's internal team.
The ROI hasn't been realized yet. That will take another quarter or two, when the bank can see on paper whether doing these things more quickly is helping it convert more deals.
When Should a Bank Bring in Specialist nCino Support?
When the bank already has a large backlog, adding the work to an internal admin's existing responsibilities means the configuration changes are drip-fed into the platform while new work keeps arriving.
If the bank doesn't have somebody who can come in, immediately meet with lenders, understand the business and make those changes in short order, the work keeps getting pushed out. With every release another two, three or four things can be added. Bringing in the right person gets the bank back to where it needs to be much quicker.
Planning Your nCino Team?
Drip-feeding fixes while new releases add more work leaves banks permanently behind. A focused specialist engagement can clear the backlog, restore unused functionality and bring lending processes back into nCino.
If you're a hiring manager building internal nCino capability, dealing with a remediation backlog or looking for contract and interim support, Empiric can help you understand the specialist talent available across the market.
If you're an nCino professional thinking about where to take your career next, or a bank planning its next hire, connect with Kyle Kuhn on LinkedIn. You can also explore current roles and our capabilities on Empiric's dedicated nCino practice page.
