ChoiceOne Bank’s Josh Hucul Receives CBM Rising Star Award

ChoiceOne Bank’s headquarters in Sparta. Credit: Joe Boomgaard, Crain’s Grand Rapids Business . A digital platform developed five years ago helped ChoiceOne Bank streamline and automate the commercial lending process. After processing $3.5 billion in commercial loans since 2019 through the Metriciti platform, the Sparta-based ChoiceOne Bank now wants to share it with peers. ChoiceOne Bank and DPT Solutions Inc., a Cascade Township company that provides process automation solutions to clients across a variety of industries, have been marketing the Metriciti software to other community banks to use for their commercial lending. “We’re trying to be a force for good in community banking and offer what we’ve developed over five years to other banks,” ChoiceOne Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Adom Greenland said. “We believe strongly that there is a market for this and that this will have a positive impact with other community banks.” ChoiceOne and DPT Solutions launched their partnership in March to license Metriciti to community banks. ChoiceOne Bank holds the intellectual property and DPT Solutions serves as the software’s reseller to other potential users for a turnkey solution for commercial lending.  DPT Solutions initially focused on Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, starting with a controlled early release and primarily targeting banks from $500 million to $10billion in assets. DPT Solutions now has “several deals in the opportunity stage of the pipeline,” CEO Dan McGraw said. One bank is “in the contract stages,” he said. Metriciti offers a “complete end-to-end solution for the commercial lending process” that includes sales management, an online application, data analytics, credit underwriting, managing client relationships and communications, documentation, and monitoring the loan and tracking the company’s performance afterward, said Josh Hucul, ChoiceOne Bank’s vice president of lending technology who designed the platform. “The efficient processes allow us and other banks to get funds in the hands of clients as efficiently and quickly as possible,” Hucul said. DPT Solutions first developed Metriciti in 2019 with ChoiceOne as the bank sought anew commercial lending software platform. The bank at the time “had a solution we weren’t happy with,” Greenland said. “We looked at the market and we weren’t happy with anything.” ChoiceOne employees knew staff at DPT Solutions, which had previously built some custom software for the bank, he said. The two companies then partnered to develop Metriciti, which ChoiceOne deployed effectively during the depths of the pandemic in 2020 to manage the “madness” and crush of applications for federal Paycheck Protection Program loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration, Greenland said. “We used this solution to help us with PPP, and that really kind of supercharged the software,” Greenland said. “We liked it so much and we’ve shown it to other banks on a friendly basis just to show them what we’ve done. We’ve had a lot of inquiries about, ‘Hey, can I use that, too?’” A couple of banks also contacted DPT Solutions, and in explaining what they needed, “basically described exactly what we did for ChoiceOne,” McGraw said. DPT introduced executives at those banks to ChoiceOne and “they loved what they saw, so we started to go through a little bit of a market analysis phase with other banks and said, ‘We’d like to just show you this thing,’” he said. “All of the banks we showed it to were excited and said, ‘how do I buy that?’” McGraw said. “We kept hearing that and said, ‘there’s a product here, there’s a market here, let’s build this as a product that we can market.’” Ensuing conversations led to ChoiceOne’s decision to license the software platform to other banks to use with DPT Solutions handling the sales, implementation and support. DPT Solutions, which is a partner with Microsoft, can tailor components of the platform to “complement banks’ unique processes,” McGraw said. “They don’t have to fit into that perfect mold.” Recent survey data within the banking industry indicate that many banks are seeking to adopt a commercial lending platform. In trade publication Bank Director’s annual technology survey in 2023, more than one in five of responding CEOs, CFOs and senior executives said their bank had upgraded or implemented a digital business lending platform in the last 18 months. Another 37% planned to do the same within the coming 18 months, according to survey results that Bank Director released last September. In a fall 2023 survey of community banks by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, nearly half of respondents said that adopting new or emerging technologies to meet customer demands was “very important.” Another 10% ranked it as “extremely important.” That survey found that the lowest satisfaction rates were for banking technologies for core services and workflow processes. Based on his experience and conversations with other bankers, Hucul sees strong interest in the Metriciti commercial lending platform. “The appetite for different new technology is certainly there. There is a lot of demand in the environment, whether it’s banks that have manual processes today that really need to get to the next level, or if they have a different provider that it just doesn’t do everything that they want it to do,” he said. “The majority of folks we’re talking to are in that bucket as well, and we’ve seen incredible demand since our launch.”