ELGIN, Ill. — It's Friday night, do you know where your members are getting their car loans? Before the advent of 24/7 that was an easy question for credit unions to answer. But now that people squeeze more chores (including shopping for a car or even a mortgage loan) into their free weekend time, having a reliable indirect lending service and call center is a basic necessity.

That's been the business of Lending Solutions, Inc, since 1994, said LSI Director John Dowling. LSI is now approaching a record three million approvals, he stated proudly. The company, which specializes in providing transparent loan processing through its call center and the Web supplies CUs with the trained personnel to make provident decisions on loans based on auto-decisioning systems (through the Web) that provides an answer within seconds. Dowling said the system will approve nearly 70% of the applications, but the rest need to be underwritten and if so, automatically go into a queue for a

human touch.