HURDITCH CONSULTING

When a niche lender wanted to improve its application lodgement experience for its customers, we assisted by documenting the business requirements for development of a new “mobile-friendly” loan origination solution

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THE CHALLENGE

The company operates in a niche market where over 80% of potential customers who start a loan enquiry do so using a mobile phone rather than a laptop or PC.

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Their in-house application software was not optimised for mobile devices, making the process unwieldy for customers and causing many of them to abandon the process mid-stream, resulting in undesirably low conversion rates.

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The company’s internal on-boarding process also needed attention as there was no systematic validation or controls on data, leading to disconnected customer service and compounding the problem of poor conversion rates.

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Internal processes were entirely manual requiring a disproportionate amount of staff effort and cost throughout the loan origination procedure which lacked scalability and was constraining the company’s ability to deliver on strategic growth initiatives.

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The business needed to review its overall on-boarding process and supporting (front end) technology platform by adopting a more robust, efficient and streamlined process - the highest order objective being that customers must be able to interact efficiently via mobile devices.

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WHAT WE DID

We reviewed available policy, process and procedure documentation and conducted workshops with key stakeholders to understand the current-state processes and systems.

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This discovery process coupled with our experience enabled us to design a future-state process that would:

• Introduce process automation and online self-service, allowing new customers to complete an application quickly and correctly;

• Validate information from the customer as it is entered;

• Generate automated prompts to assist the customer as they complete the process; and

• Advance the quality and maturity of internal operations.

 

OUR PLAN

Our recommended process flow was designed from both a customer and back-office processing perspective and included the implementation of electronic interfaces that could be leveraged to maximise efficiency gains.

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The adoption of automation around any third-party interface was conditional upon completion of an appropriate cost/benefit analysis on the basis that the business could then choose to continue with some or all of its current manual (online) enquiry processes for now and consider a staged implementation of automation as business volumes justified in the future.

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Key recommendations regarding the selection of new software included that it should provide for:

• The customer only being asked questions that are absolutely necessary to the process, and those questions should be generated dynamically as the customer completed their application;

• Only if an application failed the automated process should the company’s employees become involved to manually review and resolve;

• Automated alerts, notifications and status reports being generated, to give all stakeholders visibility over the application pipeline at all times;

• Once an application is approved, relevant documentation should be automatically generated and made available for secure download by the customer;

• Contemporary integration standards with third parties (Credit Bureau, etc.); and

• Flexible workflow management capabilities, allowing the company to implement changes to process and policy quickly and seamlessly.

 

WHAT WE DELIVERED

We documented the business requirements for a new loan origination platform adopting key elements of contemporary on-boarding practices including self-service capabilities and automation of an excessively manual back-office process.

 

Leveraging technology to improve these processes would enable the company to realise the following benefits:

• Improve the customer experience and, in turn, conversion rates;

• Reduce the time to revenue (accelerate time to cash flow by capturing new clients faster);

• Improve quality and reduce operational risk (and cost) resulting from the removal of manual processing and re-keying of data;

• Improve scalability and growth potential;

• Improve customer communications using automated emails and SMS;

• Increase productivity by freeing up staff time;

• Increase employee engagement levels so the team can focus on more challenging, value-add work; and

• Reduce risk by validating data at the point of entry and avoiding manual re-keying.