Key results

• Reduction in time to process new applications (five day to same-day processing)
• Increased scalability opportunities
• 90 working hours per month returned to the business

Background

As part of its new, future-oriented operating model, one of the nation’s leading building societies wanted to provide an improved digital experience for homebuyers and brokers. However, a large volume of applications generated from new mortgage product offers created a bottleneck in processing. This was because colleagues were still required to work through each application manually.

The building society needed an automation solution that would suit its needs so it could quickly and accurately respond to new mortgage applications and better serve its customers.

How we helped

Davies worked closely with the society to pinpoint exactly what it needed by identifying key areas that could benefit from our automation solutions. We discovered that Underwriting Associates within the organisation were required to manually transfer application data to the central back-office system before downloading large amounts of supporting documentation provided by the homebuyer or broker. The process to complete just one application took an average of 20-30 minutes.

To reduce this bottleneck, Davies assisted lending operations staff by implementing a digital worker to proactively check, download, and extract all data from new applications from Mortgage Brokers.

The digital worker now runs a series of extraction and validation checks to confirm the broker/homebuyer status and the purchase price. If any information needs to be included or remediated, it can navigate the internal and external systems to fill in the gaps. Once the application is complete, the digital worker notifies the case worker and assigns it to another digital worker for further processing.

Results

By implementing the digital worker into its operations, the nation-leading building society has observed a drastic reduction in the time it takes to receive, analyse, and process new mortgage applications from 4-5 days to now being turned around the same day.

Since the digital worker is capable of processing 267 applications per month and colleagues are no longer required to spend 20-30 minutes on each application, Davies’ automation solution is able return 90 hours (per month) back to the business.

Along with a reduction in human error and improved straight-through processing efficiency, the building society can now offer more effective digital experiences to its homebuyers and brokers, as well as provide an efficient and accurate response when applications are received at scale.