See what your digital lending presence is telling borrowers.
Before you spend a dollar fixing it.
A Signal Report is built entirely from what any borrower, competitor, or regulator can already see: your product pages, your application path, your fraud indicators, your social presence. No internal access. No analytics credentials. No sales call before you see what we found.
Delivered in 48 to 72 hours from request, or your money back.
Evidence before the conversation, not after it.
Most digital reports arrive after a sales call. This one arrives before. It is built from what a borrower with a browser can see, not survey data or self-reported answers, and it does not sell you a service menu. It sells you the conversation.
Scorecard
Every signal in scope rated against your specific digital presence, on the date we looked. Not an industry average.
Lead findings
The two to four gaps costing your pipeline the most, named specifically and connected to a production cost.
What's working
The signals already present and functioning, named specifically. Credibility requires saying what you're doing right.
Every report closes with a single next step. Not a proposal, not a service menu. One conversation, with one purpose: to find out whether what we found from the outside matches what your team is already seeing from the inside.
A real Signal Report, ready now. No email required.
This is a sample report built on an illustrative institution, First Meridian Bank, N.A., using the same Borrower Friction Index methodology behind every report we deliver. Download it and see the scorecard, the findings, and the format before you commit a dollar towards your own signal report. There are three categories: website, fraud and compliance, and social.
PDF · Illustrative institution and data
Every Signal Report is built on the Borrower Friction Index.
The BFI is our proprietary diagnostic for evaluating a regional bank or credit union's digital lending presence from publicly observable signals alone. If it's visible from the outside, it's part of the experience you're delivering, whether or not anyone inside the institution has evaluated it. The full edition covers 45 signals across three categories.
Six of the 45 signals we check.
Is a fully digital application path reachable from the product page, for every primary lending product, without a phone call or branch visit? A borrower who is ready and cannot apply online applies somewhere else.
An expired or mismatched certificate triggers a browser warning that stops a borrower cold, or lets financial data cross a compromised connection. Either outcome is a funded loan lost or a data security failure.
Copyright year, last blog post, Wayback Machine crawl history, and tech-stack signals all tell a visitor how actively you're investing in your infrastructure, whether or not you intend them to.
A deposit-insurance badge with no certificate number is unverifiable, and it's the same visual element a fraudulent site would display. Publishing the number is one line of copy and closes the gap entirely.
A human being is the one advantage a regional lender has that a fintech cannot replicate. An anonymous contact form eliminates that advantage before the borrower has a reason to value it.
"Get your rate" and "See if you qualify" let a prospect self-select. A generic "Apply today" does not. Every click from social becomes an unfiltered inquiry the loan officer has to triage by hand.
Get all 45 signals, free.
The full Borrower Friction Index, all 45 signals across website friction, fraud indicators, compliance gaps, and social media, with severity ratings for each. Use it yourself, or let us run it for you in a Signal Report.
Sent to your inbox. We never sell your information.
Not a vendor pitch.
Most digital reports arrive after a sales call. This one arrives before. Most assessments are built from survey data, industry benchmarks, or self-reported answers. This one is built from what any borrower with a browser can see. Most reports sell services. This one sells the conversation.
The institutions that find these reports credible are the ones that already know something is off. The Head of Mortgage who has watched pull-through rates hold flat despite rising inquiry volume. The VP of Consumer Lending who has seen HELOC inquiries climb with no matching increase in funded loans. The CLO who has seen application starts drop without an obvious explanation. The Digital Banking Director who has flagged the rate transparency gap internally without the authority to move it up the priority list.
The Signal Report does not tell those people something they do not already suspect. It tells them what it looks like from the outside, and it gives them something they can put in front of the people who can act on it.
Start with one product, or see the whole picture.
Product Signal Report
- All 45 BFI signals run against one lending product: mortgage, HELOC, auto, personal, or business
- Product page, application path, rate page, fraud indicators, and product-specific social content
- The right starting point when you have one channel you want diagnosed
Institution-Wide Signal Report
- All 45 BFI signals run across your full digital lending presence, every product line
- Surfaces gaps only visible in the full picture: rates on one product page but not another, a fraud warning on the main site but not the application subdomain
- The right scope when you want the full cost of the gap before prioritizing where to close it first
Both reports are built from publicly available signals only. No backend access, no internal data requests, no engagement required before delivery. Delivery is 72 hours from request or your money back.
Ready to go deeper? See the Borrower Experience Audit, $3,000 →
About Shanelle Roberts
Shanelle Roberts is a customer acquisition researcher and systems designer based in Waco, Texas. She has spent 20 years in product and systems design across T-Mobile, Wilmington Trust, M&T Bank, Microsoft, Expedia, and the UN World Food Programme, including 2.5 years inside a regional bank where she led the design team that built the first secure digital payment experience for an institution where fraud had cost mid eight figures across three prior years.
She holds a U.S. Utility Patent from T-Mobile and designed the iOS version of Scam Shield, which stopped over two billion robocalls in its first 18 months.
The Borrower Friction Index is the methodology behind every Signal Report and every Borrower Experience Review: public digital footprint analysis, no internal access required, run the same way every time so findings are comparable across institutions.
Smart Chic Systems, Inc. is based in Waco, Texas. All client engagements are delivered by US-based practitioners.
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