Client:
This bank is a part of the 10th largest financial group in the world, operating in 49 countries around the world and serving over 52 million customers every day. It’s been around for over 20 years and it operates in the area of retail, corporate, agricultural banking, small and medium enterprises banking and consumer finance.
The process of applying for a loan for an institutional client
PROJECT CHALLENGES
Automating and systematizing the process of applying for various types of loans for SME clients (small and medium-sized enterprises). So far, when applying for a loan, the Bank used an application based on MS Excel. This meant that during the whole process, Excel was exchanged between various roles in the process (client advisor, credit analyst, back office). All documents that the adviser received from the client were exchanged by email. That meant that the applications were processed for a long time. Also, verification of the completeness of the application was extremely difficult to do.
Solution
The implemented solution allowed automation of the process, and define specific roles in the process implementation and the particular stages of this process. That gave the ability to verify the current stage of the application. For example, the adviser can inform the client when the credit decision will be made. In addition, a lot of data in the process could be downloaded automatically. For example, integration with the banking system storing customer data, and integration with BIK (Credit Information Agency). BIK Entrepreneur and Individual BIK reports, which reduced the amount of data that the adviser had to receive from the client and enter into the system manually.
PROCESS FLOW
After the workshops, a joint decision was made that we would divide the system implementation into stages. In each of them, we would implement new integrations with external systems and other optimizations. Each of the stages consisted of a business analysis phase implemented on the client’s side, where the functional requirements of the system were defined. The joint workshops took place and the system analysis on our side. Later, after the client’s acceptance of the analysis, we started development and testing at the client’s site. The solution was submitted to incremental testing. By a joint decision, after conducting workshops with the client, collecting functional requirements, and proposing architecture, the sales platform has been developed incrementally.
First stage
In the first stage of the project, analysis and implementation of the basic functionality of the system. It included: automation of calculating the price offer, preparing the schedule, and calculating creditworthiness. In addition, rules related to determining the list of required documents for the processed case were performed. All business roles implementing particular stages of the process have been defined. We have integrated with DMS (Document Management System), where all documents attached to the process have been stored since then. At each stage of the process, we allowed the client to view the application and we sent e-mails informing them that the application was transferred to the right role in order to improve its implementation. We also automatically generated all contracts and documents that the client applying for a loan had to sign during processing. After successful testing, the system was conveyed to the users.
Next stage
In the next stage of the project, which was also divided into the phase of analysis, implementation and testing, we integrated with banking systems. It reduces the amount of data about the client that the advisor had to supplement. In addition, by exporting data from the application at each of its stages to the data warehouse, we enabled businesses to create reports and draw conclusions as to how the platform has improved the entire process.
Stage three is integration with another system – this time external, national – to download BIK reports on individual clients. This also reduced the amount of data that the advisor had to manually fill in up to that point. The fourth stage is to enable the download of BIK Entrepreneur reports directly from BIK – another process optimization.
TECHNOLOGY
The business process, enabling the automation of work, defining specific screens to be performed by users, resuming it when an error from an external service occurs, and defining business roles, was implemented on the webMethods BPMS platform. Data from the processed applications are stored in a domain storing data from various types of applications, from which it is possible to report to a data warehouse (technologies: Java, Spring, SpringBoot, SpringBatch). The application enabling the implementation of user tasks defined in the business process consists of UI and backend parts (UI: Angular, ngrx), backend: Java, Spring, and SpringBoot. The application is deployed on the container management infrastructure – Openshift, which enables the scalability of the solution. We used Authorization Server for authentication and authorization: Keycloak, which we implemented at the same time as the client. Documents attached by process users are stored in DMS Nuxeo.
THE SOLUTION
This platform was the first client application implemented on the container management platform – Openshift. The implementation was successful and the Bank is currently implementing all similar systems in this architecture. We have offered the client a central place to store documents that we have already successfully used with other clients – DMS Nuxeo. We have implemented the Keycloak authentication and authorization tool that has already been used globally.
The client gained full automation of the process without the need for e-mail communication, sending documents, or exchanging the supplemented application form in MS Excel. The ability to monitor the process, KPI measurement, verification, which stage of the process can still be optimized (defining the so-called “bottlenecks”), the ability to report, and quickly adapt the system to changing rules and calculations (e.g. creditworthiness, price offer).
TEAM
1 Project Manager
1 IT Architect
1 IT Analyst
4 Developers
1 IT Tester
DURATION
6 months