OpenPhone vs. KrispCall for Specialty Asset-Based Lenders

A call with a borrower about a borrowing base certificate or a covenant question often needs to be referenced again weeks or months later, whether by an underwriter finalizing a file or a portfolio manager reviewing a covenant question. Call summaries and recordings, which both OpenPhone and KrispCall support, give you something more reliable than a note typed from memory after a busy call.

Build a habit of pulling the actual recording or summary into the underwriting file itself, rather than leaving it to live only in the phone app, so it's available to anyone reviewing the file later without needing to dig for it.

Recording laws differ by state, some require only your own consent to record and others require every party on the call to agree, and a lender working with borrowers across multiple states needs to handle this carefully rather than applying one blanket policy everywhere. Confirm the applicable rule for each state you lend into with counsel, and default to disclosing that a call may be recorded at the start of the conversation, which satisfies the stricter standard regardless of which state you're actually in.

This matters more here than in most other businesses in this comparison, given how much of a lender's underwriting and servicing conversation happens by phone.

Follow these practices when recording borrower calls:

• Check each state's consent rule, since some require only your own consent and others require every party on the call to agree.
• Say at the start of the call that it may be recorded, which covers both one-party and two-party consent requirements.
• Apply the careful approach when working with borrowers across multiple states, rather than one rule everywhere.
• Store recordings so an underwriter or portfolio manager can find them again weeks or months later.

A quick text confirming a document was received is fine; a text spelling out specific loan terms, borrowing base numbers, or account details is a different risk, both from a security standpoint and because text messages are easy to forward or screenshot out of context. Set a clear internal rule about what can and can't go by text, and keep anything with real financial specificity to a call or a secure document portal instead.

Neither OpenPhone nor KrispCall changes this risk calculus on their own; the discipline has to come from how your team uses whichever tool you choose.

Building a pipeline of new borrowers, through commercial finance brokers, referral relationships, and direct outreach to companies that might need asset-based financing, is closer to a standard outbound sales motion than the servicing side of the business. A dedicated dialer like Close fits that job better than a standard business phone app, letting a business development person work through a list of prospects and referral sources efficiently.

Keep that prospecting activity on a separate line from active loan servicing, so a borrower with an urgent underwriting question isn't competing for attention with an outbound call to a prospective new client.

When a portfolio manager takes over an existing borrower relationship, whether from a departure or a simple reassignment, a shared call history saves weeks of relationship-rebuilding that would otherwise happen through trial and error. The new portfolio manager can read through past covenant conversations, payment issues, and general tone of the relationship before their first call, rather than the borrower having to re-explain their situation from scratch to someone new.

This kind of continuity matters more in specialty finance than in a lot of other lending, since these relationships often run for years and carry a lot of situational nuance that never made it into a formal file note. A borrower who has to re-explain a seasonal cash flow pattern for the third time to a third different contact starts to wonder whether anyone at the lender actually remembers their business, which is a bad impression for a relationship you'd like to keep renewing year after year, and one that's easy to avoid with a call history the next portfolio manager can actually read.