The banking industry starts implementing technological solutions, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools that can speed up work processes and protect information. Commercial lending is one of the paper-based and process-intensive businesses that have lots of people involved in one workflow: origination teams find the deal, underwriting teams deal with the numbers, credit teams opining on the probability of default, legal teams working on loan documents and, finally, operations teams undertaking the monthly servicing of the loans for a period of anywhere from one to ten (or more) years.
There are some areas within commercial lending, such as negotiating fees and terms for a borrower, where automation will not make sense, but there are others where it is starting to demonstrate impressive results.
RPA Use Cases In Commercial Loan Operations
From our work benchmarking various commercial lenders, we are seeing robotic process automation (RPA) being applied in the following areas:
1. Manual Data Entry
During the initial loan booking, lenders use the credit agreement to manually create booking sheets for manual servicing system input. On syndicated transactions, participants receive notices from agent banks and manually key in data points from the notice into the servicing system. RPA tools are utilized to scrape key loan terms from lender group notices and legal documents and auto-populate the booking systems.
2. Email Overload
Operations teams receive hundreds of emails daily from internal groups, as well as from agents, participants, trustees and borrowers. Distribution lists are useful but do not solve the email overload issues. Also, it is difficult to show an audit trail when requests and tasks have been driven through a multi-thread email conversation.
Through workflow routing, incoming emails are routed and actioned based on automatic reading of keywords and/or attachments. Amendments and other loan modifications kick off a workflow process, ensuring important items are not lost in email chains.
3. Limited Borrower Self-Service Capability
Operations respond to basic customer and internal inquiries regarding the loan. Asset-based lenders receive daily borrowing bases via email, and operations teams must extract and analyze the data.
Borrower portals allow customers to check key loan terms, and chatbots can answer basic questions without operator intervention. Asset-based borrowers can upload their borrowing bases daily, with key data extracted automatically.
4. Static Reporting
Operations teams have built static reports showing basic portfolio stratifications by geography, industry and risk rating, but other value-added analytics is performed offline. Using data analytics tools such as Qlik or Tableau, you can uncover business insights such as customer profitability and cross-sell opportunities.
Robotic Process Automation can boost the effectiveness of commercial loan operations. You should remember that it is not a solution to all the problems. RPA can assist operational teams to elevate their contributions from the realm of data entry and simple query response to the more valuable tasks.
You can start your automation journey with ElectroNeek RPA
- It does not require any IT infrastructure changes or upgrades.
- Implementation takes days, not weeks or months.
- Programmed robots are easy to deploy and operate.
- Minimal IT intervention is required.
- Higher accuracy of the task performance.
- Receiving documents by email automatically
- Data can be processed 24/7/365
- After the process is finished, the robot can be used for other tasks
To learn more about RPA implementation in banking operations, reach out to our automation experts.