How a Credit Union Cut Monthly HMDA Reporting Prep from 60 Hours to 8

"I can't speak more highly of how much it's made my life easier. I really do appreciate this system."

Phillip Urioste, Quality Assurance Manager, Arizona Financial Credit Union

Arizona Financial Credit Union is a Phoenix-based credit union with more than $3 billion in assets and 180,000 members statewide. Their lending operation runs across three separate loan origination systems — commercial, residential, and equity — each with its own nuances when it comes to HMDA reporting.

Patrick Smith, Senior Director of Operations Administration, has worn many hats during his 14 years at Arizona Financial. Phillip Urioste, the credit union's Quality Assurance Manager, came into the HMDA process about three years ago under Patrick's guidance and now owns much of the day-to-day.

When the credit union was ready to scale, Nlending HMDA Transmittal was the next step, and a faster, more confident HMDA reporting process followed.

The Challenge

HMDA reporting carries real stakes: data gets submitted, scrutinized, and can surface in an exam years after the fact, so at a credit union growing as fast as Arizona Financial, the question was never whether the process would need to evolve. It was just a matter of when.

Data coming in from three directions. Working across three separate loan origination systems meant the LAR data was rarely clean out of the gate. Reconciling all of it required significant manual work before anything could be submitted. "We spent a ton of time just manipulating the LAR," Patrick said, "and then put it in and kind of hoped that it's in a format the system could read."

A time burden that added up fast. Phillip owned the monthly data scrub and knew better than anyone what it took to get the data where it needed to be. "My biggest struggle was making sure that data was right." The staffing model reflected that reality: 40 to 60 hours a month, every month — and not all of it was active work. A significant chunk was waiting for the desktop system to process data. "Click a button, wait. Click a button and wait."

Audit risk hiding in the process. Patrick thought about the cost of manual processes when scrutiny arrives. "Would it be cheaper when the auditor came knocking, and I have to spend 40, 50 man-hours just to answer their questions — or can I just pay it up front and have a system do a lot of the heavy lifting for me?" Moving to a cloud-based platform was a proactive call, not a reaction to something broken.

The Solution

In its move from on-prem to cloud services, Arizona Financial Credit Union chose Nlending HMDA Transmittal.

"A "seamless" transition. Arizona Financial wanted a system transition well outside of peak HMDA season, and Ncontracts was able to accommodate that timing. "Everyone was very responsive, very quick to jump in and explain.” The security questions the IT team raised were resolved quickly. "It was almost so smooth that I don't even remember when it happened,” Patrick noted.
From data import to submission, all in one place. Phillip still runs a scrub before uploading, but Nlending's import tools catch what that scrub misses before it ever affects the final LAR. “My favorite part is being able to edit it there and just submit directly from the software itself. It's awesome.”
Visibility into the LOS. Nlending gives Phillip the ability to identify where the loan origination systems introduce errors — something he hadn't had before. "If I pull the LAR and I'm getting it into the system and it's telling me, ‘hey, you shouldn't be doing that,’ I can go dig and ask the business owners, ‘hey, what's going on here?’"

The Results

From 60 hours to 8. The time savings were immediate. “The tools that Nlending has to basically map and manipulate data from the file import have saved us an immense amount of time… I have a lot more confidence in the system."

Confidence at submission. HMDA data can be scrutinized years after the fact, and the team needed to know they could stand behind what they submitted. "There's always going to be a level of anxiety there… but knowing that even if I am questioned here in two, three years, I can just go pull it up and take a look at it — rather than just looking at a LAR that spit out to Excel." Plain-English guidance built into the tool helps too. "All of that just gives us more confidence when we're submitting at the end of the year."

A team that can scale. When Arizona Financial brought on a new team member with no prior lending compliance experience, Phillip was able to put her to work immediately. "I could say, ‘hey, I need you to clean up these 150 loans. The system's going to tell you exactly what needs to be done. So, just go take a look.’ That's my favorite part."

Advice for Other Financial Organizations

Patrick has seen firsthand what the move to cloud services can unlock. "There are so many new capabilities gained moving into a hosted service… It unlocks opportunities for operational effectiveness and efficiency that we hadn’t even considered prior.” For institutions still on manual processes, he puts it simply: "If you're doing HMDA on spreadsheets, you really need to be in a system in this day and age. You have to get it somewhere where you can audit it."

"I can't speak more highly of how much it's made my life easier,” Phillip said. “I really do appreciate this system."

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Arizona Financial Credit Union Success Story

How a Credit Union Cut Monthly HMDA Reporting Prep from 60 Hours to 8

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