From passive borrower to active user: The role of digital banking solutions in deepening engagement.

Indirect lending plays an essential role for many financial institutions. It’s a powerful way to grow your loan portfolio, whether through auto loans at the dealership, or personal loans offered through third-party channels. But often, the connection with these borrowers stays strictly transactional.

An indirect loan may start as a transaction, but that doesn’t mean the relationship should stay there. With the right digital banking solutions in place, you can bring these borrowers into your ecosystem, and turn simple payments into the beginning of deeper engagement.

The Indirect Lending Disconnect

If we’re being honest, most indirect borrowers only interact with the institution when it’s time to make a payment. They don’t experience the ease of your digital banking solutions and tools. They don’t build a connection that drives loyalty or future product adoption.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

What if making a loan payment wasn’t just a task, but the first step toward deeper relationships and greater share of wallet?

Integrated Loan Payments: A Simple Step That Changes Everything

By integrating loan payments into your digital banking experience, you do more than streamline a process. You open the door to long-term engagement. Surveys consistently reveal that account holders crave a simple, user-friendly way to make loan payments from external accounts. In fact, Alacriti clients have seen up to 25% increases in digital payment volume and 23% higher monthly transaction value simply by making outreach more proactive and payment flows frictionless.

Instead of sending borrowers to a separate portal or leaving them disconnected from your brand, you make payments part of a seamless, familiar experience, complete with tools like timely reminders, Pay by Text, and magic links that remove barriers and drive on-time payments.

That’s exactly where solutions like Alacriti Orbipay EBPP come in. With a modern, cloud-based approach, you can embed flexible loan payment channels and methods directly into your digital banking platform and channels. Borrowers enjoy the convenience, and you get a crucial opportunity to introduce them to everything your institution offers while increasing payment capture rates.

The Role of Reporting and Analytics

Payment modernization revolves around the very data that powers it. When you have a consolidated view of all payments, regardless of channel, you capture valuable insights about payment behaviors, channel preferences, and user patterns. Detailed reporting and analytics help you understand which borrowers are staying digital, who still needs outreach, and where targeted offers can strengthen the relationship.

For example, usage trends can identify indirect borrowers who pay consistently but haven’t enrolled in online banking or signed up for Autopay. With that information, your teams can craft tailored outreach, like a cross-sell offer for a checking account, personalized payment reminders, or incentives to enroll in additional services.

Visibility into digital payment adoption also makes it easier to track return on investment (ROI) on your indirect lending program, showing how payment behavior translates into deeper digital engagement.

Why It Matters: From Engagement to Retention

Bringing indirect borrowers into your digital experience is about more than convenience, it’s about building relationships that last. Let’s dive into some of the benefits:

• Increased Cross-Sell Potential: Once borrowers engage with your digital channels, they’re more likely to explore other products, whether that’s a checking account, credit card, or additional lending options.
• Stronger Retention: Offering multiple channels such as Venmo, Apple Pay, Guest Pay access, and Pay By Text ensures flexibility for accountholders, reducing friction in the payment process. Seamless financial transactions, encourage indirect borrowers to want to do more business with you.
• Operational Efficiency: Integrated, self-service payments reduce call center volume and manual processing, freeing up your teams for more strategic work.

At Alacriti, we see payments as more than transactions. They’re key moments to engage, educate, and bring borrowers into your digital banking experience, especially those who might not have started there. With our single, unified platform we offer consolidated services and features so that you can deliver exceptional payment experiences to your consumers.

The Bottom Line

Indirect lending will always be a critical growth channel. But without the right digital strategy–or the support of effective digital banking solutions, those relationships risk staying surface-level. By bringing loan payments into your ecosystem, you create a simple, meaningful way to convert indirect borrowers into engaged, long-term users. It’s a small shift that can lead to lasting results for your institution and your borrowers.

Through Alacriti’s partnership with Alkami, financial institutions can deliver a seamless, modern digital loan payment experience fully integrated into the Alkami Digital Banking Platform. Alacriti’s Orbipay EBPP is a customizable electronic billing and payments solution that offers the flexible channels, methods, and options account holders expect from a best-in-class digital bill pay experience.

Want to learn more? Connect with an Alkami representative to explore Alacriti’s payments solutions and how, together with your digital banking solutions, they can help you increase engagement and lasting loyalty.