rates), collecting required documentation (new account opening compliance requirements must be met at this stage), selecting add-on products (such as payment protection insurance), and eventually signing a completed application. Dependent on the institution and product being offered, the application may be completed on a paper application form, or directly into an online application through the agent's desktop system. In either case, this phase of application is mostly concerned with the accurate capture of customer's details, and does not incorporate any of the background decisioning work required to assess the suitability of the customer and the risk of default, or the due diligence that must be performed to mitigate risk of fraud and money laundering activities. A major complexity for the branch origination channel is making the process simple enough that sales agents can be easily trained to handle many different products, while ensuring that the many due diligence and disclosure requirements of the financial and banking regulators regionally are met. Many back-office functions of loan origination continue from this point and are described in the Processing section below. Self-service loan application Self-service web applications are taken in a variety of ways, and the state of this business has evolved over time Print and fax applications or pre-qualification forms. Some financial institutions still use these. Print, write or type data into the form, send it to the financial institution Form fill on the web, print, and send to the financial institution (not much better) Web forms filled out and saved by the applicant on the web site, that are then sent to or retrieved (securely, presumably) by the financial institution True web applications with interfaces to a loan origination system on the back end Many of the early solutions had a lot of the same problems as general forms (bad work flows, trying to handle all manner of loan types in one form) Wizard-style applications that are very intuitive and don't ask superfluous questions Jobs the online application should perform: Present required disclosures, comply with various lending regulations) Be compliant with security requirements (such as Multi-Factor Authentication) where applicable. Collect the necessary applicant data Exactly what is needed varies by loan type. The application should not ask for data the applicant doesn't absolutely have to provide to get to a prequalification decision for the loan type(s) they seek. The application should pre-fill demographic data if the applicant is an existing client