Stop the Stall: Cleaning Up the Messy Middle of Lending

The Hidden Barrier to Funding

Many lenders focus on perfecting the application flow, but the friction and risk often surface after submission.

Once a borrower submits a loan application, your team immediately jumps into verification, underwriting, and disbursement prep. But instead of moving quickly, they hit a wall: outdated liability data, unverifiable debts, and fragmented payment processes. Delays compound, increasing operational costs, creating borrower frustration, and hurting conversion.

If you're considering addressing these issues by building your own integrations and payment solutions, consider what that entails: complex security and compliance demands, fragmented payment tracking, manual error resolution, and escalating costs.

This is the Exact Complexity Method Was Built to Solve

With just borrower identity and consent, Method connects directly to verified liabilities across 15,000+ financial institutions, core banking systems, and card networks—no logins, no redirects, no PDFs. Instantly access updated debt data from major institutions to long-tail creditors, with embedded payment rails to those same creditors, all in one cohesive API.

By delivering fresh financial data, accurate payoff quotes, and verified payment details, Method helps you approve and fund with confidence, without the operational headaches.

The Friction Between Application and Funding

Your flows are likely designed to capture debt details directly from the borrower—this can take up to 3–5 business days, and many users drop off before completing the process. Even after approval, your payment ops team spends another 7–12 business days verifying debts and payoff details. You find accounts are mistyped, in settlement or incomplete, and your ops team ends up chasing down documents and making calls.

Even after approval, disbursement stalls when the borrower mistypes creditor information. Every delay adds risk, every manual step adds cost, and in a competitive market, every hour matters.

Method Eliminates Post-Approval Friction

Method connects you directly to the source. Near real-time liability data flows instantly from financial institutions, core banking systems, and card networks. This means you can:

• Access fresh account information: Current balances, due dates, interest rate ranges, and accurate payoff quotes are instantly available.

• Pre-fill verified liabilities: Eliminate document uploads and borrower input with verified creditor and account details-speeding up your verification process.

• Retrieve 10-day payoffs directly from FIs: Receive precise, updated payoff quotes-including fees and projected interest—so you can disburse the exact amount needed to close the account. This reduces manual operations overhead and cuts the retrieval time down from days to seconds.

• Stay updated when it counts: Method doesn't just give you a liability snapshot, it provides up-to-the-minute visibility into major account changes, helping you catch risk signals after approval but before funding.

Automate Payoffs with Direct-to-Creditor Payments

Verifying debt is only part of the process. Making sure borrowers actually use their disbursements to pay down the right debts is where things can get tricky.

Method Pay gives you a direct rail to send funds to verified creditors automatically, without requiring the borrower to enter account or routing details. This ensures your disbursements are accurate, trackable, and truly payoff-driven.

Here’s how it works:

• Pre-fill verified payment info: Pull real account and routing details directly from the source - no guesswork, no mismatches.

• Execute direct-to-creditor payments: Route funds instantly to verified accounts, with end-to-end tracking from pending to posted—ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.  Non-technical teams can easily track payment status through Method's Dashboard and resolve customer questions with estimated delivery dates.

• Accelerate time-to-fund: Remove the borrower from the disbursement process entirely and fund the same-day with confidence. Lenders like Happy Money saw same-day payments increase from 50% to 96% after switching to Method.

• Reduce support tickets: With no manual money movement and full visibility, borrowers aren’t left wondering if their loan got paid off, which leads to fewer inbound support calls.

If you’ve already modernized your application to let borrowers choose which debts to pay down upon disbursement, Method can enhance that experience by automatically executing those choices with verified payoff and payment data.

Where Lending KPIs are Made or Missed

When you clean up verification and streamline payment processes, the metrics that matter to lenders move in the right direction:

• Higher pull-through: Verified data and pre-filled flows reduce drop-offs before funding.

• Shorter time-to-fund: Reduce loan funding delays caused by manual payoff quote collection and creditor matching.

• Lower cost per funded loan: Automation means fewer borrower touch points and support tickets, leading to lower operating costs.

• Fewer disbursement errors: Verified payment details and end-to-end tracking ensure accuracy.

• Lower fraud losses: Spot synthetic IDs, debt settlements, and credit stacking before funds go out with Method’s updated risk attributes.

The Bottom Line

Method helps you close the gap between approval and funding with real-time liability data and streamlined repayment infrastructure. Your loans don’t just fund faster—they fund cleaner, with less manual work, fewer errors, and fewer surprises.

If you’re modernizing underwriting, don’t stop short. Lending disbursement operations are just as critical. Clean, confident approvals mean nothing if the payments stall, misroute, or trigger back-office rework.

In a competitive market, speed matters. Method's clear, robust API documentation means most teams can implement our solution in weeks, not months.

Ready to learn more about how you can streamline your entire flow from quote to payoff? Request a customized demo with Method's dedicated team.