Poppy Bank Success Story

The Solution

John adopted Ncontracts as his compliance command center, relying on its integrated solutions to transform risk and compliance oversight: 

• Nlending for lending compliance oversight. Nlending provided the foundation for managing Poppy Bank’s lending compliance program across both business and commercial lending portfolios. 
  
• Ncomply to navigate the regulatory maze. "Ncomply enables me to understand all these regulations that seemingly are changing by the minute,” John shared. "I can go in and tag the regulations that I know will impact the bank and begin to formulate actions, action items, and then assignments to our different business partners throughout the bank as those regulations are making their way through." 
• Nrisk to streamline risk assessments. After establishing Nlending, John began using Nrisk for the bank's risk assessment process. The ability to tailor risk and control levels to align with the bank's established framework was critical. "I'm used to analyzing income and financial statements and property values on the lending side, but Ncontracts has really helped me in that regard." 
• Data Explorer for simplified reporting. Data Explorer simplified reporting and accelerated turnaround time. The efficiency gains were remarkable: "Being able to assemble all that data, whether I'm pulling it into an Excel spreadsheet or pulling it right into a PDF document and embedding it in our board reports — it took me less than a day." 

The Results

By making fuller use of Ncontracts, Poppy Bank realized measurable gains across its compliance and risk operations. 

Faster, more efficient risk assessments. Risk assessments that previously took "quite a long time to complete" now take half a day or less. John quantified the overall impact: "Huge time saver… I think it improved my efficiency by at least 20%, maybe 25%." 

Better, board-ready risk assessments. "Having the ability to edit the risk levels and the control levels in Nrisk so they more closely align with the risk and control levels the bank had already established — and that our board was most familiar with — was very, very important," John noted. Once configured, he could identify risks and controls, pull the key reports he needed, and assemble board-ready documentation. "I'm quickly learning how well Nrisk fits our business model and allows us to put together some really, really good risk assessments." 

Risk reporting aligned to board expectations. “Having the ability to edit the risk levels and the control levels [in Nrisk] so they more closely align with the risk and control levels the bank had already established — and that our board was most familiar with — was very, very important,” John noted. 

Flexible risk assessments built from expert templates. “In Nrisk identifying the template risks, the template controls and having the ability — which was really important, by the way — to edit the risk levels and the control levels so that they more closely aligned the risk levels and control levels that the bank had established.” 

Strong internal adoption. Colleagues are eager to adopt solutions when John enthuses how gathering data is “a breeze.” “When I showed our BSA/AML Officer who's been with the bank for six years now, what Nrisk could do, we scheduled time for me to go over a tutorial on using Nrisk because she's still in the Excel spreadsheet.” 

Clear ownership of compliance obligations. Ncomply enables John to tag relevant regulations, create action items, and assign tasks to business partners across the organization. This eliminated the back-and-forth emails and potential missed assignments that plagued manual tracking methods, ensuring accountability as regulations evolve. 

Always-current regulatory insight. The monthly regulatory wrap-ups and email updates ensure John and his team stay in the loop on the most critical updates affecting the bank. “After I light the computer up… within 5-10 minutes I'm going through the emails that I'm getting from Ncontracts — especially with Ncomply [and] being able to look at regulatory updates as they're happening." 

Improved reporting. "As I worked my way through the testing of our CMS, I quickly realized, oh, there's data fields that if we can get our business partners, our internal business partners to begin using, we can extract so much data on the fly." 

Responsive, knowledgeable client support. John praised the consistency and quality of Ncontracts' support team: "Ncontracts customer support, in my opinion, is top-notch." Once, when John reached out via chat with a system question, he received "a very usable response in less than a minute," with support immediately understanding his context and providing actionable guidance.

Centralized compliance intelligence. Ncomply's complaint management module provides “top-notch tools” for quickly entering, assessing, managing, and tracking complaint data. John was most excited about data fields that enable robust trend analysis: "We can extract so much data on the fly and begin trending consumer complaints, especially those that might be touching regulations that compliance or risk management would need to be aware of." 

Looking Ahead: Infrastructure built to scale with the bank

As Poppy Bank grows, its risk and compliance foundation is already in place to support expansion — without rework or reinvention. 

"Having a technology partner like Ncontracts that, one, you have folks that are watching the regulatory environment, keeping track of all the different agencies that are publishing rules, and being able to access that in one central location and manage how it affects the bank — very critical to us, especially as we grow and hit that $10 billion point."