The Product That Started Teslar: An Interview on Teslar’s Exceptions Platform

Before Teslar expanded to include workflow automation, loan origination, customer portals, and other banking solutions, the platform was built around a single idea: making exception tracking easier for community financial institutions.

Since its creation, the solution has grown alongside Teslar and helped community institutions centralize financial, collateral, covenant, policy and required document exceptions in one platform.

To discuss Exceptions and why it remains such an important part of banking operations, we sat down with Spencer Presley, Sales Engineer at Teslar.

About Spencer:

In his 10 years at Teslar, Spencer has worked in support, client advocacy, training, and sales, helping institutions implement and refine their exception tracking processes from many different perspectives.

How would you describe our Exceptions tool to someone unfamiliar with It?

In a nutshell, Exceptions helps institutions stay true to their policies. Whether that's monitoring debt service coverage, tracking financial statements, managing collateral documentation, or ensuring required deposit account documentation is on file, Exceptions helps institutions stay organized and prepared. We always want to make sure if you're ever audited or examined, you've got the documentation you need.

What makes Teslar's Exceptions platform different?

What's unique about our tracking system is that we do everything in one location. At the bank I worked at, I would track my financial ticklers on a spreadsheet, and I would go to my core to look at my collateral items, and I'd go somewhere else to see my TE documentation.

In Teslar, you see everything in one platform. I can see my financials right next to my title policies, right next to signature cards on the deposit side. Everything's in one spot. It's easy to see. It's easy to get to.

And another differentiator is we use the same tool on both sides of the house. Our exception solution is the same for the deposit retail side as it is for the loan side. They all get the same tool.

Why did Teslar build Exceptions?

Exceptions is the first thing Teslar ever did. We used to just be an exception tracking platform. When our CEO and Founder, Joe Ehrhardt, started the company, he was actually traveling the country with the FDIC. Getting with banks and seeing their exception tracking processes, Joe realized shortcomings in the process and recognized an opportunity to improve it. He came back to Arkansas and got to work on a platform that could help banks with that.

Over the years, we've grown Exceptions and made it not only an exception tracking tool, but an exception reporting tool that can work in a 500-million-dollar bank or a 30-billion-dollar bank.

What Insights Can You Gain from Your Exceptions Data?

Exceptions is really helpful as an early indicator, especially on the loan side. For example, checking your financials every quarter. If something starts to fail, you can know before the payments start to go downhill.

And when we talk about Exceptions from the reporting aspect, there's a lot of information that could be mined from the results of your exceptions tracking. For example, you could dig and see how the financials are coming back in the hotel space overall or debt reports out of a specific market segment. These could be early indicators of other issues that may not just be in a particular customer, but an entire market in general.

Today, Teslar supports far more than exception tracking, but the platform that started it all continues to help community financial institutions manage exceptions with greater visibility and confidence.

Ready to see how Teslar’s Exceptions system can help you gain a complete and 100% accurate view of your portfolio? Schedule a demo here or reach out to sales@teslarsoftware.com to learn more.