お客様事例 |
Lombard Expands Partnership with nCino: Becoming the First Financial Institution to Deploy ProBanker for New Era Lending
For Lombard, part of NatWest Group and the UK's leading provider of asset finance, innovation isn't just about adopting new technology. It's about transforming how they serve customers.
Lombard has been an nCino partner for 14 years and was an early adopter of our SmartBanker solution in 2021. They are now the first institution to deploy ProBanker. In doing so, they’re equipping their frontline lending teams with the clarity to lend smarter, support faster, and grow stronger client relationships.
The Challenge: Closing the Visibility Gap
Lombard’s SmartBanker deployment has been an overwhelming success - the advanced capabilities enable relationship managers to unlock new opportunities through daily customer, sector, and market news. But like all commercial lenders, Lombard's lending team faced a familiar frustration. Specifically, they had limited visibility into clients' total market exposure and an incomplete view of risk and opportunity across their lending portfolio.
This visibility gap is particularly acute in UK commercial banking, where 70% of businesses are multi-banked. Reduced visibility into total exposure serves to delay decision-making, increase the chance of opportunities being missed, and open blind spots in risk assessment that can leave them exposed.
The opportunity for Lombard is vast, with UK SMEs alone predicted to require over £70 billion in funding by 2030. The challenge was set. Enhance visibility into client affordability to simultaneously reduce risk, orchestrate a superior commercial lending experience, and identify funding gaps that represent genuine growth opportunities.
The Solution: ProBanker Intelligence Orchestration Across the Commercial Lending Lifecycle
In 2024, Lombard piloted nCino’s new ProBanker solution to tackle this challenge head-on.
Developed in partnership with Experian, ProBanker combines data from 180+ commercial credit contributors, 17 million commercial credit agreements, and over £180 billion in active commercial lending exposure. A market-first, it delivers actionable intelligence that fundamentally transforms how lending teams work.
Rather than treating onboarding checks, affordability assessments, risk management, and ongoing monitoring as separate silos, ProBanker orchestrates an end-to-end approach that gives Lombard the complete picture they need at every stage of the commercial lending lifecycle, including:
Liquidity Visibility: Near real-time liquidity insights, cash flow patterns, and debt exposure across multiple banking relationships. Giving Lombard’s lending team a complete picture of every client’s financial health.
Proactive Monitoring: Immediate access to key financial changes, credit search activity, and early risk indicators. Giving their lending team advanced warning of issues and more opportunities for timely client outreach.
Decision Acceleration: Structured data on outstanding balances, repayment histories, and total exposure across products. Helping their lending team streamline credit decisioning and accelerate time to funding.
Opportunity Identification: Unified borrowing views and analysis. Assisting their lending team in identifying optimal moments for value-driven cross-selling.
“Using ProBanker, we were able to spot emerging payment and liquidity trends before meeting the customer. That insight changed the conversation — allowing us to talk openly about their liquidity position and bring in our invoice finance specialists at the right moment to support them. Turning potential risks into opportunities for tailored client support”. Kirsty Herbert, Relationship Director, Lombard
The Result: A Substantial Opportunity to Lead the Lending Market
The pilot delivered quantifiable impact - convincing Lombard to deploy ProBanker, alongside their existing SmartBanker integration, across lending teams to grow market share and capture significant annual pipeline opportunities.
Together, SmartBanker and ProBanker provide Lombard with a 360-degree view of customer financial health, risk, and opportunity and transform reactive relationship management into a proactive, data-driven strategy that seamlessly blends superior customer experiences with robust risk management:
SmartBanker delivers the engagement intelligence: customer news, sector developments, and market insights that help Lombard stay connected to the broader business environment.
ProBanker adds the critical layer of real-time credit intelligence that reveals what's actually happening with client finances across their entire banking ecosystem.
“We are delighted to be early adopters of this game-changing technology, putting enhanced data in to the hands of our Relationship Managers. We’re already seeing the benefits in terms of our ability to provide market-leading solutions to our customers." Paul Edwards, Managing Director Lombard
Why This Matter for the Industry
As the first institution to move ProBanker from pilot to production, Lombard is demonstrating how lenders (from big banks to niche alternative lenders) can move beyond simply contributing information and instead harness intelligence to drive better outcomes.
The beauty of this approach is its scalability across the lending spectrum. For example, asset finance providers can identify equipment funding gaps, and for invoice financiers, the opportunities to spot earlier are invaluable. Likewise, challenger banks and alternative lenders can compete on speed and insight rather than just price. For every use case, the common thread is that it moves financial institutions from reactive credit decisioning to building proactive relationship strategies powered by complete market intelligence.
This comes at a crucial time. For financial institutions struggling with the visibility gap, Lombard's results offer a clear roadmap: orchestrate intelligence across the entire customer lifecycle and set the standard for commercial banking innovation in the UK.
“What excites me is the opportunity to combine our deep know-how with advanced data science to truly transform sales effectiveness, customer support and risk management across the whole client lifecycle.” Paul Edwards, Managing Director Lombard
Want to learn more about how Lombard achieved these results? Download the full case study to discover the complete story behind the nCino and Lombard partnership.
Related Articles