Azerbaijan Bank’s Automation with Sizable Productivity Boosts

Banks are increasingly facing the pressure of automation and innovation. This change touches upon brick-and-mortar institutions as well, challenged with rapid customer base growth and slow speed of manual operations. The 4IRE team is highly experienced in banking process review and customization in line with every client’s individual needs and business strategy. Here is a case study of 4IRE coders’ collaboration with a financial institution, Azerbaijan Bank, focusing on the lending process’s automation and scaling.

Client’s Profile 

The client is a part of an international financial conglomerate covering 20+ countries with banking services. The company’s subsidiaries serve clients in many regions, including Europe, Asia, and Africa. The bank’s clients range from individuals to SMEs and private entrepreneurs. 

Client’s Requirements/ Goals 

The client wanted to increase lending process automation and comply with the international quality and performance benchmarks in the digital lending niche. To achieve this goal, they wanted to develop and set up a Loan Origination System to automate procedures associated with lending operations. An additional business goal included the expansion of the service range. 

Business Challenge 

The 4IRE team encountered the following challenges when approaching the client’s order: 

• Achieving large-scale business process efficiency improvements with automation solutions 
• Addressing the growth-related challenges of the bank 
• Automating the review of loan applications and loan issuance without quality compromises 
• Selecting the optimal technology for the bank’s loan origination system in compliance with international standards 
• Expanding the product range of the client with cutting-edge technology integration and big data analytics 
• Attaining a higher speed of loan decisions and loan disbursement 
• Establishing a multi-channel customer service and chatbots for customer support automation 

Implementation

A team of nine 4IRE experts worked on this project: 1 Project Manager, 2 SME business analysts, 4 developers, and 4 QA testers. The technology stack for the project’s completion included Java, AngularJS, jBPM, DROOLS, and Postgres. 

The process of automation platform selection was rigorous and demanding, with the bank’s administration seeking the most scalable and flexible solution for their needs. The ABLE Origination system was finally selected based on a series of quality criteria and features meeting the bank’s strategic goals. 

The ABLE Origination System takes minimal time for implementation, rarely exceeding two months, and brings end-to-end automation into the financial service provider’s infrastructure. The system works well even with minimal human input and maintains a high level of personalization and service quality. It is a fully customizable solution, giving clients endless flexibility in front-end design and functionality settings.  

Solution Delivered 

The integration process spanned three broad stages of the lending process, with the 4IRE team working on automating these procedures to ensure a smooth workflow. 

1. Loan Application Automation 

The greatest bottleneck of the client facing rapid growth was the slow speed of loan applications’ processing by its employees. The ABLE Origination System included an automated tool for application collection and initial processing based on a standard set of requirements for the borrower. 

This way, the system managed to weed out the non-eligible loan applications at the initial stage, giving the applicants automatic responses about their compliance or non-compliance. The outcome of this process’s automation was a twofold increase in employee productivity.  

2. Application Review and Decision-Making 

The second stage involved a deeper analysis of the applicant’s profile and credit scorecard to make a personalized loan offer. The 4IRE coders integrated the ABLE system with the bank’s database to automate this process as well, enabling quicker client data verification and loan offer issuance based on the predetermined client categories. 

As a result of this innovation, the overall productivity of the loan processing pipeline increased 4.5x, with sizable satisfaction increases and staff working with loans and loan applicants. 

3. Loan Documentation and Disbursement 

The final stage of the loan processing service is documentation and the actual disbursement of the borrowed funds. The 4IRE team also introduced improvements in this stage by automating the process of credit documentation and credit account setup. The clients only needed to sign the documents in the bank’s office, while the rest of the procedures were done automatically based on the client data in the database. 

The automation of the third stage achieved a cumulative effect of productivity gains throughout the whole lending lifecycle and resulted in more than a 6x increase in employees’ productivity. 

Project Outcomes 

The implementation of an innovative lending processing system is still in progress. The work on this project started in April 2020; the first phase was submitted in May 2020, the second phase ended in July 2020, and the third phase – in February 2021. The outcomes of completed phases included: 

• A 6x increase in employee productivity in loan application processing across the entire pipeline (from application receipt to final loan disbursement). 
• A fully functioning omnichannel system of application initiation. 
• Instant feedback to applicants about their chances of receiving a loan. 
• Load testing on the development server revealed a threefold reduction in the application processing meantime.

The bank managed to reduce the processing time to 3.216 applications per hour while attaining greater convenience and personalization of its service. The client also appreciated the 4IRE team’s extensive expertise in banking process automation, top-tier software development quality, and robust QA testing. 

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