Desert Financial Ditched the Paperwork Grind and Nearly Doubled Indirect Deals

Indirect lending has to be fast-moving, dealer-driven and traditionally requires someone sitting at a desk manually checking bank statements, driver’s licenses and income documents. It’s also where credit unions lose competitive ground when speed determines who gets the deal.

Desert Financial Credit Union found a way out of that bottleneck. By partnering with MeridianLink and Informed IQ to automate document validation across their indirect auto lending program, they didn’t just speed things up. They transformed the entire operation.

The numbers back it up. Desert Financial’s daily funded deals jumped 66%, going from 15 closed deals a day to 25, and now regularly hitting 30. That growth came without adding headcount. It came from eliminating the manual document review that used to eat up funders’ time and, as Desert Financial Indirect Funding Manager Deniece Carreon put it, their Saturdays.

“It’s the exact opposite,” Deniece said when asked if the automation required more labor. “It’s less labor for our funders.”

Megan Pulliam, head of industry partnerships at MeridianLink, and Jessica Gonzalez, VP of client success at Informed IQ, joined Deniece to unpack how the integration works. MeridianLink is the ingestion point for loan files coming through dealer platforms, while Informed IQ’s automation verifies documents, checks for fraud and runs the validation checklists that used to require a human opening file after file.

With synthetic identities and AI-generated fake documents becoming more sophisticated, Informed IQ’s fraud intelligence network gives credit unions visibility across a shared pool of lenders, catching bad actors who might otherwise slip through by hitting multiple institutions with the same fraudulent paperwork.

Desert Financial’s experience shows automation is about staying in the game when 80% of indirect loans are getting instant decisions elsewhere.

Watch the full conversation with host Sarah Snell Cooke to hear how Desert Financial approached the rollout and why questioning ‘the way you’ve always done business’ might be the most critical lesson.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Hello, and welcome everybody. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, the host here at the Credit Union Connection. I am joined today by three lovely ladies. we’re gonna talk about AI-powered automation and modern, indirect lending. First, I’d like to introduce Megan Pulliam. Welcome.

Megan Pulliam: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And she is head of industry partnerships at MeridianLink. Next, we have Deniece Carreon at Desert Financial Credit Union. Welcome.

Deniece Carreon: Thank you.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Thank you for being here. Of course. And Deniece is the indirect funding manager for Desert Financial. And finally, we have Jessica Gonzalez. Welcome.

Jessica Gonzalez: Thanks, Sarah. I appreciate being here.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Love having you here. So she is the VP of client success in lending at Informed IQ. So with all that, I’m gonna go ahead and let you guys do quick intros of yourself and your organization. We’ll start with Deniece.

Deniece Carreon: Yeah, happy to be here today. Thank you for having me. My name is Deniece Carreon, again. I’ve been the indirect funding manager at Desert Financial for a total with the credit union of 23 years but the last four and a half in indirect lending with this new department. Happy to be here.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Awesome. Awesome. And Megan, you’re next.

Megan Pulliam: Thanks, Sarah. I’m Megan Pulliam, here at MeridianLink. We serve thousands of community banks and credit unions here in the United States with our loan origination platforms. I’ve been in the industry for over a decade now, supporting partnerships here at MeridianLink and at other places to help lenders such as Deniece get the most for their organizations and their members, and working with partners like Jessica and the team at Informed IQ to bring ever-increasing automation and solutions to market to benefit our customers.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Awesome. And last but not least, Jessica.

Jessica Gonzalez: Yes. Hi, everyone. Like you said, Jessica Gonzales. I am a VP of customer success at account at Informed. I really sit in the intersection of all our lenders and, really consultative, from the perspective of AI, automation, document intelligence, as well as fraud. I’ve spent more than 15 years in the financial industry, from Santander to Visa, really focused on auto payments, really strategy and operations. And right now I do what I used to do from a digital book of work perspective for a lot of seven of the top 10 lenders and financial institutions of automating and really focusing on doing right by the customer.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Awesome. Excellent. Now, Informed IQ and MeridianLink have partnered with each other and Desert Financial. I’m gonna ask Deniece first, explain your indirect lending program. Are you working with a larger partner? Are these dealerships your credit union is set up? How are you running your indirect at your credit union?

Deniece Carreon: Yeah. So we work with Route One, Dealertrack, and CUDL platforms there at Desert Financial. And so we have about 400 or so dealers on our three platforms collectively. And day-to-day we service the entire state of Arizona at this time and just growing as an institution, but also across the valley here, to service our members and non-members and new members alike.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Awesome. Awesome. Always love to add new members, right? And Jessica and Megan, I’m gonna let you guys duke it out for who’s gonna speak first, but can you explain the integration that you all did that is now serving Desert Financial?

Megan Pulliam: Absolutely. Here at MeridianLink, like I said, we are always on the lookout for innovative new solutions that help our lenders serve more members, be more efficient. And we’ve partnered with Informed IQ to improve automation. So today, our systems work in conjunction with one another to support the processes that Deniece’s team run with those dealers in that dealer channel. Jessica, would you like to describe a little bit more about how Informed works?

Jessica Gonzalez: At the foundation, the MeridianLink platform is the ingestion point of all of those loan files. So a dealer has a consumer buying a car, they’re looking for a really great rate, Desert Financial comes up as an opportunity. Those loans flow into the MeridianLink system, Desert Financial’s instance of our software. And then we have an automation and an integration with Informed IQ to pick up those loan files and work their magic.

I think you did an amazing job with that, actually. But I’ll just go a little bit more specific. From the perspective of Informed, it’s that when customers come to us, they have a problem, which is they need their documents to be digitized. They wanna ensure that there is a source of truth and that there’s no fraud on those documents. So we enable, through MeridianLink, memberships and credit unions, like Desert Financial, to be able to do that. So digitizing all of that data, so any of those checklists that a funder would be doing, we’re able to do those verifications.

So if the bank statement, a valid bank statement? Did we have transactions on that bank statement? What is my income? All of those questions that you would be processing from an underwriter perspective and a funding perspective, we’re able to automate those checklists.

From the perspective of why we do the partnerships and why we’re really excited to be partnering with MeridianLink is just because when customers come to us, one, it’s really a lot to take on an automation project and any technology project, you’re thinking, “Hey, how am I gonna get actually get this to work with my infrastructure?” So MeridianLink has really made that seamless for us, because you’re able to get it up and running a lot faster and smoother. And the integration is just plug and play, really. And so from that perspective, just like the dealers, they don’t really know the automation is happening, and that’s how we like to keep it, right? And hopefully that’s a smooth transition as well and takes off some of that weight from our credit unions.

Sarah Snell Cooke: I do have fraud questions later on, but I wanna start with the purpose of Desert Financial really transforming its previously manual funding workflow into the automated environment, focusing on speed, consistency, scalability, all things that can be hampered by us lovely humans. So I wanna take these one at a time, sorta. Regarding the scale of your indirect auto loan operations, you had your daily individual funding grow 66%, which is a big jump, from 15 closed deals a day to 25. How has that been going for you all? That’s a serious increase. Is there extra labor or time on your side?

Deniece Carreon: It’s the exact opposite actually, Sarah. It’s less labor for our funders. With this partnership and being able to have a great collaboration with Informed and MeridianLink, we’ve been able to continue to decrease the funding time for our funders. It is very much a hands-off process. That document validation piece really does the work for us and allows us to really just focus on those more complex type deals. But it has been a game changer for our team to be able to kinda be hands-off and really just work on other items, other tasks, other things that takes away from doing that manual validation process previously as we were for each loan.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Which likely isn’t as accurate, isn’t as fast.

Deniece Carreon: It’s not.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And won’t scale unless you have 100 people sitting in a row.

Deniece Carreon: Yeah.

Sarah Snell Cooke: I’m gonna start with Megan this time, and then Jessica, you can hop in. How does that happen? Are these typical results relative to the size of a credit union’s indirect portfolio? What are you expecting out of this partnership?

Megan Pulliam: Yeah. I will let Jessica speak to the informed solution specifically, but when we entered into the partnership, I jokingly called it take back your Saturdays, where right when people are out shopping for an auto, they want an answer when they’re sitting at that finance manager’s desk. And it’s imperative that person gets vetted, that the documentation comes in, but then having somebody have to sit at the funding desk and go, “Okay, let me open the driver’s license picture. Let me open up the bank statements. Let me open these things up and process them.”

Having that in the platform and happening in an automated fashion really frees that staff up. And I will tell you, it is a competitive market out there. Deniece and her team are competing against others for these loans, right? So the faster that you can get a response back that says, “Hey, I’ve vetted the deal, I’ve vetted the loan applicant, and I have all the information that I need,” that’s happened in an automated fashion. Not only is it speed to get all of that info in one place, but getting that answer back to the dealer, to the finance manager when that person’s sitting there waiting for their car, waiting for the answer, it makes our customers way more competitive. I heard a stat the other day from one of those large indirect players that said that more than 80% of those loans are being instant decisioned.

So if you can’t collect the information and automate the back-end processing of that information, you often lose your seat at the table. … so I will say that’s what we’ve seen with others that have adopted these solutions, is they can actually get that answer back to the finance manager, back to the consumer, in a really fast way

Yep.

And, Jessica, any follow-up?

Jessica Gonzalez: Yeah, like I said, my, it’s hard to follow Megan because it’s a very precise points. But I would really just to add, I think from the perspective, it really makes credit unions being a competitive differentiation, right? We used to, you would think that you could really only had the business that you had and that book of work that you had, and that you didn’t know how you were gonna scale, right? And you probably didn’t feel comfortable with a different type of market. Now, really with this technology, you can play with much larger organizations. It really makes you continue to have that relationship, deep, heavy, be able to be nimble, and then also level the playing field, that now you’re able to compete in markets that maybe historically you didn’t feel comfortable in.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And, Deniece, I wanna follow up too on something you said a bit ago about, it’s actually saving you time, and what kind of time and effort, what kind of results are you seeing? What has this meant for your team, your members, your credit union?

Deniece Carreon: Oh, gosh, so many things really. For our team specifically, the morale and work-life balance have definitely improved over time. Back dating to last year, we were in such a large turn time, and our dealer partners were feeling it. We were feeling it. We were doing a ton of overtime, and as Megan said, we wanted to give those Saturdays back to our employees. And from that perspective, it really just increased employee morale. People are excited to see what else Informed IQ do for us, and so we’re having continuous conversations about what is the continuation of this partnership going to look like. For our dealer partners, they are ecstatic. They are just raving about how quickly they can get their deals funded when they’re clean. And service level expectations have just wowed the dealer, if you will, because they can come to us and get a funded deal very quickly, with no hassle. And then for our organization, we continue to look at efficiency and scalability and all of those things. And as an organization, we have goals, right? We’re looking to expand to a million members, and the indirect platform is a big player in that, new member acquisition realm. And for us to be able to onboard this tool has allowed us to increase our business and continue to grow our platform without expanding our team.

Sarah Snell Cooke: For sure. And, Jessica and then Megan. Jessica, you get to go first this time. How important, what were you hearing from dealerships, or if you were hearing from dealerships or from other credit unions or just banks, whatever, on how important the dealer experience was and what needed truly needed improving?

Jessica Gonzalez: Yeah. I think we’re always a representative of the lending organization, so when we go to dealer visits on behalf of Desert Financial, it’s great to hear, honestly, that they don’t know what’s happening in the backend. They just see the experience, that it’s gotten better, faster, people are happier. So you have the relationship, you have that good judgment, and you don’t have to question things. The people still are there. They’re still having those heavy relationships, but everybody’s just in a better, happier mood because things are just seamless and happening much faster at a much better pace. I think, like you said, the Saturdays, nobody wants to be going through checklists on a Saturday. You wanna be able to go in and walk in and get your car. The same thing happens for a dealer, right? Everybody wants to have more business, have a better experience with that business, and I think that is really impactful. So a lot of times the dealers don’t realize that there is automation back there, that they don’t realize Informed is doing that. And honestly, I like to sit in the backseat there, because I really – it likes music to my ears that Deniece is so happy and proactive and wants to do more things with Informed because that’s what it’s all about, is making Deniece’s life happier, her team’s life happier, so that the dealers are in a better mood, and then, we wanna grow, because it’s a win-win situation for us all.

Megan Pulliam: And then I would just add that it’s challenging economic times for a lot of people. And what I hear most is you sit down with the finance manager, right? And they, if it’s a new automobile and you’re at a large dealership, they know that they can get the financing from their captives quickly. They can get that quote. But I’ll tell you the thing that our credit unions and what’s really been important to me and why I do what I do is credit unions offer excellent, exceptional financing. And to be able to help our customers get those answers quickly to the consumer so they have an option that saves them money, it’s imperative. It’s imperative to be able to enable people to do that. And I think that’s what we hear most is that we wanna make, again, our customers competitive ’cause those finance managers want the option. And the faster that we can do it and the more automation we can bring to the table, the happier they are, too.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Oh, sure. Sure. We touched on the dealer experience, which sometimes can be a secondary thing, because everybody is more worried about the member experience typically. But so that’s very important. Also, the operational efficiency. We’ve talked, Deniece, a lot about the efficiencies that you guys have achieved. How long did it take for this partnership to really take off and achieve those kind of numbers?

Deniece Carreon: We started the pilot in January of this year. And, I would say probably midway into February we knew that this was the tool that we wanted to move forward with. Initially, there is a lot of work that has to go into this, right? We had two incredible funders who did our testing for us, along with our system administrative architects. And they were constantly meeting to go through obstacles and, what do we want the process to look like, how are we gonna make this better with using Informed. And so we were meeting almost every other day with the Informed team, and they were troopers. But they, and even Meridian Link, and they were just great to work with because they took what we had to say, and they made it happen for us. And so with that, by March, the beginning of March, we actually had already started to onboard the rest of our team into using Informed, on the Meridian Link platform. And I would say probably when we started to see the biggest efficiency was come May, where we just absolutely demolished funding numbers, that took the same amount of people, however less work to get there. We were able to eliminate overtime, and all of those extra manual workloads. But I would say in May, we really saw that huge increase as a team. From there it has only gotten better. Mentioned earlier that we were doing about 25 funded deals a day, and now it’s closer to 30, and beyond that some days, which is just phenomenal. Phenomenal.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Absolutely. So any follow-up on that, Jessica or Megan?

Megan Pulliam: Love it. And I will say we’re hearing similar things from other clients of ours that have adopted the solution on the platform. They are doing more business. Their teams are ecstatic. And, just to point out, we’ve been talking a lot about the indirect channel. This solution works across the loan portfolio, so whether it’s getting an answer back quickly on a credit card application or a personal loan, a direct auto loan, same thing applies. It’s that button that gets to the answer, without requiring a lot of intervention on manual tasks that really don’t get at the complex, right? The exceptions that need to actually be looked at. We’re hearing similar results from our customers.

Sarah Snell Cooke: We touched on fraud and risk a minute ago, just briefly, but, it, obviously indirect, does carry more risk than direct loans. So how are credit risk and fraud accounted for and mitigated in this faster environment? And I’ll start with Jessica first. Sorry, Megan.

Jessica Gonzalez: No, I love talking about fraud, so I’m excited. Really from the perspective of it is that, like I said, credit unions either they have a niche, and so they really know whether they require documents or don’t require documents. What’s great about Informed is that we really work with their policies. So you continue to sell, be the same credit union that you are, and we’re just enabling it to be much faster. So nobody wants to have to provide income documents, utility, bank statements, all of those things. But when you do, you wanna make sure that they’re accurate as well as not fraudulent. So Informed, and now it’s very critical with ChatGPT and Nana Banana, all the technology. My teenagers know how to make bank statements, so it’s really great that you are able to have the trust that you always had, and so that you’re able to expand your business and not take on additional risk that you did not once have in your portfolio. So I think that’s really key because we wanna grow, we wanna be able to continue to have those great rates, provide the transparency, and then not have additional risk or fraud losses. So I think that’s really key. And, for Desert, for other lending institutions as well, it, like I said, it’s a really different differentiator because you can play in a much larger pool without having the fear that you’re gonna have more risk or losses associated.

Megan Pulliam: Yeah. And as hard as it is, there are bad actors out there. And the job for us is to help our customers approach the market in the safest manner possible. The ability to take in a document, automate it, and I think the word you used, Jessica, as the right one is trust. Every time we approach our customers and talk about the power of automation, and automate your decisions, and get the answer back quickly, you have to trust the solution underneath it is gonna help you do that. So knowing what Informed has invested in their platform and their technology allows our customers to rely on that to say, “Yes, they’re gonna help me catch fraudulent docs. They’re gonna help me catch those bad actors.” And they are one tool, one very important tool in the arsenal, right out of the gate.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And Deniece, do you have any feedback on that? What are you seeing in that area, in that realm of the credit union?

Deniece Carreon: We do come across that unfortunately. Fraud is rampant these days. We are currently having some discussions with Informed regarding their, and Jessica may be able to speak to this better, but their tool called Defender, which might be useful to us on the indirect side to continue to help kinda mitigate some of that fraud being that we didn’t have an automated tool for that at this time.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And so I always allow my guests to have final thoughts, close out the show. I’ll start with Jessica and go around my screen. What are your final thoughts you wanna leave our credit union audience with today?

Jessica Gonzalez: Yeah. I think it’s the fraud, though. So for the perspective of it’s the fraud network that Informed has is a really game changer from the perspective. And really credit unions utilizing it is a really key factor because what we see in synthetic rings as well as credit stacking, all of those scenarios, is that you go to a small credit union, then you go to a large top lender, and they’re pulling out several different retail installment contracts. And so now having the ability for Desert to see across the fraud intelligence network and be able to say, “No, I’m not gonna take on this risk and loan,” knowing that it’s a synthetic ID and that you’re also having multiple other ones, I think that’s just so easy for everyone to understand, like that, that makes a big impact. You catch one of those, it’s really affecting your bottom line, and you can feel really good about those decisions. So I think it’s just, when business makes sense, it makes sense, and so I think we all don’t want fraud in our portfolio. And as an industry, I think it’s something that’s really changing the game for everyone, right? Small organizations can take a huge impact, but even large lenders realize that it takes everyone to be part of the community so that we can all stop the issue happening. So really excited about the fraud network. I’m excited that there is that out there for us because I think it’s been a problem that no one really could solve until recently of understanding, hey, there’s actually somebody that is sitting over there. They pulled one out, they got a car, and then they actually came over here. We can understand the VIN, if they’re matching it, if it’s the same vehicle. Historically, we were always like, “Maybe they’re not actually that bad, and maybe they had an issue, and maybe they’re gonna return the car.” And so you’re always trying to give people the benefit of the doubt. So when you actually can get the bad actor and you can feel good about it and feel good about your business, I think, like I said, it’s a win-win.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Awesome. Awesome. And Megan, you’re next.

Megan Pulliam: Yeah. First, the enthusiasm of our customer base for this partnership, for this solution, off the charts. And I think, as part of my role, we’re constantly looking for ways to enhance those relationships that work for us. So it’s on our roadmap to continue to expand the capabilities and the functionalities that Informed has, and make those available to our customer base, as well as other things that help Deniece and her peers across the country at credit unions do their job even better. So very excited that this has delivered the results that it has and will continue to. And, it works for all of us. I think it… Like I said before, it’s so important, I think, as what we do for our communities to keep doing these things.

Sarah Snell Cooke: And Deniece, take us home.

Deniece Carreon: Yeah. I’ll just say that as our organization continues to grow and expand the credit union across the state of Arizona, we’re looking for efficiency, right? And sometimes it’s just right there, and we just need to connect it to what we’re doing day to day. So I would say question your processes. Be open-minded about what are you doing day to day, and are you just doing it because that’s the way you’ve always done business? So being able to have an open mindset going into any such project is gonna be crucial for yourself, for your team, to be able to not only pave the way for that change, but then also continue the growth, right? We all have goals in mind that we’d like to meet, and so with that, we need to do the things and question the things that we’re doing today that’s gonna help us get there. And then after that, just have great peers, partners, collaborations, and good direct reports. All of those things make a difference as well.

Sarah Snell Cooke: Yeah. Love it, ladies. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.