Loan Underwriting Deferral and Triage
Continuing our series on Digital Business Automation and how we can help make a business more efficient and effective, I’m going providing a few articles about a project our team recently put together. This was a proof of concept (POC) project in the loan industry. As we move through this series, I will highlight some finer details of features and design. This particular project was completed using IBM Business Process Management (BPM) and Operational Decision Manager (ODM), along with some external API integration. This video focuses on the mortgage industry; however, we’ve used the tools and methods described here to successfully implement solutions in the financial, manufacturing, retail, medical and many other varied business sectors.
Automation relies on communication. Think about how people used to order things — you would place an order by phone or by mail. Then you would wait and wait and eventually the item would show up or you would have to call the shipper and find out where things ended up. But now we live in a world where you can get automated updates as your package moves along its route, and delivery proof instantly via photos on your phone. Wouldn’t it be great if your office work was the same? Who has that requisition now? Why hasn’t financing gotten back with us? Whose approval are we waiting on? These kinds of updates and status access are built into the Digital Business Automation approach.
In this video we’re looking at loan applications submitted for underwriting. We see the view of the submitted loan application from the perspective of an underwriter tasked with reviewing the submissions. The underwriter has the ability to send messages back to the submitting lender with information on how to resolve status issues. These kinds of back-and-forth exchanges are common requirements in most industries, and might be requests for additional documentation, clarification of details, or explanations of decisions.
If additional documentation is requested, it triggers a “review documentation” step. Integrated solutions like this are able to help keep track of the progress, including handling the document management portion, such that users would not need to email back and forth but could find the documents, notes, revision details immediately from inside our BPM application.
Users can see the update history and easily make any needed changes. Issues with the request can be quickly resolved from one page, with needed information ready at hand. There are also built-in social tools so users can request assistance from experts within the company, and see additional details about what other team members have done with the request. This includes the ability to save notes about the work item for yourself or others who might need to see them.
Users will often have more than one job within a process, so our solution also allows us to create filtered views that show the work appropriate to a particular role. Our underwriter also has a view for fraud reviews. This activity is not something that would happen with every loan underwriting review, so it is an ad hoc process which can be triggered as needed or as required. Accordingly, it sits in our process diagram as a stand-alone process that has its own sub-processes. In our next post, we’ll take a look at the software tools used to build our loan underwriting software, IBM BPM Process Designer.
If want to learn how Apex can help your company experience a Digital Business Automation makeover, contact us at info@apexbpm.com or (947) 282–6026.
