Trends & Insights

Josh Hucul, Vice President, Lending Technology, has received the 2024 Rising Star Award for his significant achievements in developing Metriciti.

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.”

Pictured from left to right: Josh Hucul, ChoiceOne Bank Vice President Lending Technology; Dan McGraw, DPT Solutions Chief Executive Officer; and Adom Greenland, ChoiceOne Bank Executive Vice President Chief Financial Officer. 

Innovation doesn't just happen. it takes forethought, planning and follow through. Read how community banks have translated fresh ideas into a return on investment by building innovation into their normal operations. Download the article from ICBA Independent Banker to read more.

As seen in Great Lakes Banker. In an industry where innovation often feels out of reach for smaller players, ChoiceOne Bank took an ambitious leap, transforming a challenge into a groundbreaking opportunity. Faced with the limitations of existing commercial lending platforms for community banks, ChoiceOne developed its own solution - Metriciti - a strategic move that would reshape its future and provide an opportunity for community banks nationwide. Driven by the need to address critical gaps in the market, Metriciti was built by ChoiceOne to provide a seamless integration of sales management tools, mobile app, underwriting with automation in financial spreading, portfolio management, robust data reporting and analytics, integration with Microsoft 365 and other third parties to provide a commercial loan origination platform built with the end users in mind. While the journey wasn’t easy, Metriciti has played an integral role in driving ChoiceOne’s loan growth. What started as an ambitious idea has now led to an opportunity to share their product with other financial institutions seeking enhanced efficiency and technology that can scale with their growth demands. ChoiceOne has a history of partnering with local tech firms to create innovative services and support Michigan entrepreneurs and small business owners. This history would prove remarkable starting in 2019. While in the midst of Covid-19 and two bank acquisitions, ChoiceOne emerged with Metriciti – a game changer for community banks. Keeping a Dream Alive The Innovative Journey Begins ChoiceOne’s journey began nearly 10 years ago as an unhappy client of a large legacy loan origination platform. The commercial team was frustrated with inefficiencies, lack of flexibility, no voice in product improvements, data that was trapped, and paying for unused features. Josh Hucul, ChoiceOne Bank Vice President Lending Technology, who has been the lead on the Metriciti project from the beginning, recalls when he and others had the same realization, “There has to be a better way, even if we have to build it ourselves. We believed we could build better, common sense processes to streamline lending and ultimately not settle for the status quo of being forced into a box that other traditional vendors would have placed us in. Commercial lending is complex, but it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. With commercial loans being a dominant portion of our balance sheet, we needed a platform that would be able to scale with our growth in the long-term. Building a preferred solution was the way forward.” Leap of Faith After much research, a proposal was built for an end-to-end solution built on top of a well-known CRM, Microsoft Dynamics. To make this project happen, ChoiceOne turned to DPT Solutions (DPT), a local Microsoft Partner with deep expertise in business process consulting and a track record of building complex custom configurations and integrations with Microsoft Dynamics. “Selecting the right partner was critical and it was clear that the requirements we needed would be fulfilled by what DPT could build,” Hucul noted. “While nothing existed on the market, a platform built on the infrastructure of Microsoft was a perfect match. It would fit seamlessly into existing Microsoft products that ChoiceOne subscribed to, it was a cloud-based solution, full CRM and sales management tools, an open platform to integrate to and from third parties, fully customizable and configurable, and allowed us to access all the data that we collect and marry it to other data we had across the Bank.” Metriciti Emerges The birth of Metriciti took place early in 2020. During this time, and over the next several years, there were significant changes happening within ChoiceOne and the overall business climate. ChoiceOne would announce two bank acquisitions, and Covid-19 would change how business was conducted. It also brought about the ensuing Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and PPP Forgiveness Loans. “This turned out to be great timing for the Bank,” said Hucul. “We dramatically streamlined many of our processes that would have been done manually, and it allowed us to do a ‘soft launch’ of the new Metriciti platform with staff and clients by pivoting development work to build out a PPP Forgiveness portal that facilitated thousands of requests from our clients. It truly was a testament to DPT and our early desire to control our processes and outcomes to be able to position us so quickly and effectively.” DPT and ChoiceOne continued to enhance and iterate the platform. “One of the key value propositions in a lending platform is its ability to amplify the output of the bank’s staff by eliminating redundancy and time spent on unproductive tasks,” said Hucul. “The end users know where the bottlenecks exist and what tasks and processes aren’t intuitive. We’re very purposeful in gathering feedback from those users. In the end, that’s how we get the best product.” From In-House Solution to Industry Game-Changer In early 2023, a bank was referred to ChoiceOne via DPT to take a look at the platform they had built as they were investigating a similar path. The results and feedback of those discussions led ChoiceOne to travel down a path they had only faintly envisioned – selling Metriciti to other financial institutions. As a result, ChoiceOne and DPT began ‘re-building’ Metriciti into a new structure that would allow other institutions to purchase the platform and benefit from the product that ChoiceOne and DPT had created. ChoiceOne spun the intellectual property into a new entity, continuing to manage the product roadmap, and enlisted DPT to be the exclusive reseller of Metriciti, handling all sales, implementation, and support.