The Conway National Bank
Conway National Bank is the dominant community bank on the Grand Strand, holding $1.94 billion in assets across 15 offices from Aynor to Pawleys Island, and it has earned a five-star Bauer Financial rating every year for decades. But from a borrower's perspective the digital lending experience does not exist: every product page for mortgages, auto loans, home equity, credit lines, and consumer personal loans ends with a direction to call (843) 248-5721 or stop by an office. The business lending page offers a contact form but no loan intake. CNB2GO handles account management well, and the online banking portal is self-hosted and branded, but loan origination remains 100% branch- and phone-dependent with no after-hours capture path for the Myrtle Beach tourist and retiree market the bank serves.
The borrower journey today
How a prospective borrower actually moves through Conway National’s digital properties right now, line by line.
What we’d change
Zero digital loan intake across all five product lines
Every loan product page on conwaynationalbank.com resolves to a phone number or a direction to visit a branch. This is not a fragmented-portal problem — there is no portal at all. A prospective borrower who finds CNB on a Saturday evening through a Google search for 'home equity loan Myrtle Beach' leaves the site with no way to start an application. In a market with 15 million annual tourists and a large retiree population, after-hours demand goes entirely uncaptured.
No rate transparency on any loan product
None of the five loan product pages publish a rate, a range, an APR, or even a 'rates as low as' teaser. Competing credit unions and fintech lenders serve the same Grand Strand market with instant-quote tools. A borrower who wants to compare before they call will not find what they need on CNB's site and will likely complete an application elsewhere before a lender calls back Monday morning.
Business loan page collects curiosity, not applications
The business/commercial lending page offers a 'Get Started With CNB Today!' form that captures a name, mailing address, phone, and a free-text comments field. It does not capture business name, loan purpose, amount requested, or any financial data. The result is a cold lead — indistinguishable from a general inquiry — that a lender must call back and re-interview from scratch before any underwriting can begin.
Grand Strand market creates a high-value digital capture opportunity
Horry County's population grows by a reported 15 million visitors annually, and the Myrtle Beach MSA has been one of the fastest-growing retirement destinations in the Southeast for five consecutive years. CNB already holds the branch network to serve this market; what is missing is the after-hours, mobile-first front door that captures the borrower before they leave the search results page. With ~309 mortgage, ~195 commercial, and ~2,372 consumer loan originations per year and no digital intake, the addressable improvement from verified digital intake is measurable at roughly $634K annually in efficiency and captured-lead value.
What it could look like
Below is a live, interactive white-label demo in Conway National’s own branding: one front door, every product, with identity, income, and property verified automatically. Try it, or open it full-screen.
Today vs. with RAVEN
| Today | With RAVEN white-label | |
|---|---|---|
| Loan products you can start online | 0 of 5 — every product says call or visit a branch | All five products, one branded front door on conwaynationalbank.com |
| After-hours loan demand | Voicemail or a dead end on the website | Borrower verified and queued; lender receives a complete file Monday morning |
| Rate transparency | No rate, range, or teaser on any product page | Optional instant estimate from your rate card at the top of the funnel |
| Identity, income & employment | Document collection after the lender calls back | Verified automatically in ~90 seconds at the point of application |
| Business loan intake | Contact form with name and comments; lender starts from zero | Owner identity, business financials, and bank account data verified before first contact |
| Brand continuity | Stays on conwaynationalbank.com but ends at a phone number | CNB branding end to end from first click to verified file in core |
What your loan officer receives
The instant a borrower finishes that flow, a fully verified application lands in the RAVEN dashboard. No rekeying, no document chase, full audit trail.
Jordan Carter
What automated verification is worth at Conway National
CNB's primary market is Horry County, the fastest-growing county in South Carolina, anchored by Myrtle Beach and Conway. The county added 7,331 new housing units in 2024 alone and is projected to grow by 216,000+ residents by 2042. In-migration is driven by retirees from the Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, DC metro), remote workers, and families seeking coastal affordability. The Georgetown County footprint adds the Waccamaw Neck corridor (Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet) - an affluent second-home and retirement market. The borrower base skews toward conventional purchase loans (159 of 309 HMDA originations in 2024), with meaningful refi and home-improvement volume from existing residents and retirees. All figures below are estimates built from public data (FDIC, HMDA, CRA filings). See the methodology.
Where the time goes today
Roughly 2,876 files a year need borrower verification at Conway National: identity, income, employment, assets, and property, collected today through document requests and follow-up calls.[3]
That is 0 staff hours a year in the expected case, recovered as origination capacity rather than headcount reduction.[1]
Value by lending line
Different files carry different verification loads. Commercial files (beneficial ownership, guarantors, business financials) take the longest; consumer files the least. Expected-case annual labor value:[1][2]
The full math
| Line | Conservative | Expected | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff time savings[1][2] | $310K | $627K | $1041K |
| Pull-through revenue (3-15 added closings)[4] | $2K | $7K | $12K |
| Total estimated annual value | $312K | $634K | $1052K |
The growth side: new residents, captured digitally
Roughly 1,100 new households move into Conway National's footprint every year, and about 30% of movers open an account with a new bank. They shop with their phones. A white-label, fintech-grade intake flow (the same 5-minute experience above) turns that migration into a lead channel the bank owns instead of renting.[6]
| Annual | Conservative | Expected | Optimistic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital leads captured | 17 | 44 | 99 |
| Funded loans from those leads | 2 | 13 | 50 |
| Value (loan profit + avoided lead spend) | $3K | $23K | $114K |
This is new revenue, not savings, so it is shown separately and excluded from the headline number above.
Beyond the dollar math
The In-Migration Borrower Problem: Verifying People Who Just Arrived
Horry County added over 7,300 new housing units in 2024, with the majority of CNB's purchase-mortgage borrowers originating from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. These in-migrants often have complex income profiles: recent job changes, remote-work arrangements, multi-state pay stubs, or newly retired status with investment income replacing W-2 wages. Manual document collection for these borrowers is slow and error-prone, and branch-centric processes that work fine for long-tenured local residents create friction for buyers who may never set foot in a Conway branch. RAVEN's automated income, employment, and asset verification resolves the file within hours regardless of where the borrower is calling from, giving CNB a competitive edge in the market it dominates.
Efficiency Ratio Discipline Meets Loan Volume Growth
CNB runs one of the most efficient community banks in South Carolina, with a sub-48% efficiency ratio in Q1 2026 - a metric that requires relentless cost discipline as the loan book grows. The bank originated 309 mortgages in 2024 and holds an $845M net loan portfolio against only 16 branches and a lean noninterest expense base of $34.6M. Scaling further without proportionally adding underwriting staff is the central operational challenge. RAVEN replaces the hours a loan processor spends chasing pay stubs, bank statements, and employer phone verifications with a single API-triggered workflow, compressing per-loan labor cost precisely where the efficiency-ratio math is most sensitive.
Winning the Waccamaw Neck: Digital Reach Into an Affluent Second-Home Market
CNB's Georgetown County footprint covers Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet, and the Waccamaw Neck corridor - a high-income coastal strip where the typical buyer may be a second-home purchaser or retiree from another state with complex asset structures (brokerage accounts, trust income, rental property cash flow). These borrowers expect the closing speed they associate with larger digital lenders, not a week of back-and-forth document requests. CNB generated 41 HMDA originations in Georgetown County in 2024 at an average loan size of $352K, well above the Horry County average, suggesting significant upside if turnaround times improve. RAVEN's asset and identity verification layers make it possible for CNB to compete for this higher-balance segment without adding specialized staff.
Want this with Conway National’s real products and rates?
We’ll wire your actual product lineup, your rate card, into a private demo, then pressure-test every number above against your real volumes.
We also published an independent analysis of Conway National's performance and market:
Read: Conway National Bank's Quiet Dominance on the Grand StrandMethodology & footnotes
Hours saved per file. Published verification-automation case studies (Blend Labs, 2025) report 15-16+ staff hours saved per mortgage file across loan officers, processors, underwriters, and compliance. We model mortgages at 6-14 hours, commercial files (which add beneficial ownership, guarantor identity, and business financials) at 8-16 hours, and simpler consumer or HELOC files at 2-6 hours. The expected case sits well below published benchmarks on purpose.
Loaded staff cost. The $38-48/hour range blends Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS rates for South Carolina loan officers (~$30/hr), processors (~$28/hr), underwriters (~$55/hr), and compliance staff (~$50/hr), including benefits. Most verification labor falls on processors and loan officers, which is why the blend sits closer to the lower rates.
Verification volume. Mortgage counts come from HMDA Modified LAR filings via FFIEC, which report actual originations. Commercial, HELOC, and consumer volumes are estimates derived from FDIC call report loan mix and branch footprint; they are not reported figures and could vary materially. The 60-day pilot exists to replace these estimates with the bank’s own measured numbers.
Pull-through improvement. The MBA reports roughly 68% industry-wide mortgage application abandonment. We model a 1-5 percentage-point improvement applied to originations (not the larger application pool, which would produce a roughly 3x bigger figure), at the MBA-reported $785 average profit per closed loan. Published case studies report 10-15 point gains; our optimistic case is one-half to one-third of that.
What this is not. These figures are directional estimates built from public data and industry benchmarks. They are not a quote, a guarantee, or an analysis of the bank’s internal workflows, and recovered hours are modeled as redeployed origination capacity rather than headcount reduction. Banks already running highly automated verification will see less; banks running fully manual document collection will see more.
New-resident lead generation. TD Bank research reports roughly 30% of consumers open an account with a new bank after moving (and movers 55+ switch at a higher rate than millennials), while 91% of consumers say digital capability matters in choosing where to bank (MX, 2025) and more than half of online banking applications are abandoned mid-flow (The Financial Brand; Innovatrics). We model a bank with a white-label, fintech-grade intake flow capturing 1.5-9% of new-to-market households as started applications, converting 12-50% of those to funded loans (expected case: ~55% completion times the MBA-reported ~55% depository pull-through). Value per funded loan combines the $785 MBA average profit with $500-1,500 of avoided lead-acquisition spend, the going rate per funded loan from purchased shared and exclusive lead channels. New-household counts are derived from Census county population estimates and are not bank-reported figures. This line is shown separately and is not included in the headline savings number.
Digital audit sources: conwaynationalbank.com (/, /personal/, /personal/personal-loans/mortgage-construction/, /personal/personal-loans/auto-loans/, /personal/personal-loans/home-equity/, /personal/personal-loans/credit-line/, /business/, /business/business-loans/, /personal/online-banking/, /about-us/, /seniors/), conwaynationalbank.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/CNB-CRA-2025.pdf (2025 CRA Public Information file, March 2025 revision), Apple App Store listing for 'Conway National Bank' app (id6503983602, v3.35.1), FDIC BankFind cert #2102 ($1.94B assets). Taglines 'Dream Big - Start Small' and 'CNB Is Here For You Every Step of the Way' from live homepage. Core banking system not publicly disclosed; no third-party online banking domain pattern detected; marked unknown. Credit card processing via PSCU (dxonline.pscu.com). Reviewed June 2026.
ROI data sources: FDIC API (institutions endpoint CERT:2102, financials endpoint), OriginationData.com HMDA 2024 (LEI: 2549008EFPQHWHJ5MO60), conwaynationalbank.com, Census Reporter Horry County SC profile, FRED BPPRIV045051 (Horry County building permits), Carolina Crafted Homes 2025 Myrtle Beach in-migration data, SEC EDGAR CNB Corp. filings, WBTW Horry County population projections