A Large Commercial Bank Turns Its nCino Investment Into a True Growth Engine

A large commercial bank partnered with Coastal to unlock the full automation potential of its nCino and Salesforce investment — eliminating manual underwriting steps, automating risk ratings and credit memos, and creating a single data foundation across the loan lifecycle.

Challenge

A large commercial bank had the right technology foundation, with nCino and Salesforce running its commercial lending engine. But its loan team was still spending valuable time on spreadsheets and data reconciliation instead of client relationships. To support its growth trajectory, the bank set out to close that gap, turning the platform into a true engine for automation.

The bank had been on nCino for some time, but a mix of legacy practices and data complexity was limiting how much the platform could do. The bankers were skilled, and the process was thorough, but too much of the work was still happening outside the system. Challenges included:

Disconnected Underwriting: Loans under a certain policy threshold, along with global cash flow analyses, were managed in external Excel sheets and disconnected from the primary nCino workflow.

Manual Risk Ratings: Bankers relied on traditional policy matrices to calculate risk, bypassing nCino's automated templates entirely.

Document Disconnect: Documents generated outside nCino required manual placeholder entry back in the system, slowing loan boarding and introducing unnecessary handling.

Data Alignment: Historical data loads created redundancy between Salesforce and the Fiserv core, requiring time-intensive reconciliation.

Reporting Complexity: Reports were assembled manually, absorbing valuable time during origination.

The strategic shift wasn't about replacing software; it was about trusting and optimizing the ecosystem the bank already had.

Solution

The bank set out to build a system where data is entered once and then flows everywhere, from underwriting to credit memos to compliance reports. Coastal helped the team define clear rules: when to use nCino, where Agentforce Financial Services (formerly Financial Services Cloud) belongs, and how Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) sets up future segmentation.

Automated Risk Flow: nCino now captures risk ratings once and pushes that data automatically into loans and credit memos, ensuring consistency across all deal sizes and eliminating manual entry.

Streamlined Credit Memos: Credit memos generate directly inside nCino using pre-filled loan data, cutting administrative prep time for the underwriting team.

Operational Automation: Automated document placeholders eliminate manual file handling, while system-generated credit alerts keep bankers ahead of renewals and modifications.

Continuous Optimization: Coastal's Waves Managed Services keeps the platform in tune as the bank grows, monitoring performance, governing changes, and surfacing the next automation opportunities.

Clouds & Products

nCino
Data Cloud
Financial Services Cloud

Results

The shift showed up across the loan lifecycle, from how underwriters spent their day to how leadership saw the customer.

Sharper Deal Focus: Automating credit memos and risk ratings gave hours back to the underwriting team — time now spent on credit quality, not data entry.

Lower Operational Risk: Automated placeholders and credit alerts cut manual file handling and reduced the chance of human error during origination.

Faster Loan Boarding: Eliminating swivel-chair handoffs between external systems and nCino accelerated loans through to boarding.

Scalable Foundation: Resolving data duplicates and integrating core systems created a 360-degree view of the customer — the foundation for advanced segmentation and growth.

Client-Centric Banking: Underwriters and relationship managers spend less time on data work and more time with clients.

Scalability isn't just about having the right tools — it's about full utilization. Many institutions have invested in platforms like nCino but cap their ROI by holding onto familiar manual practices. The real growth comes when teams trust the automation to absorb the routine, freeing bankers to do what they do best: banking.