Bank speeds loan documentation via RPA

Steady economic recovery had led to renewed interest in loan products, so Union Bank wanted to speed its ability to process loans. Delays can mean lost sales, slower time to revenue and a noticeable impact on the bank’s cash flow.

When the bank packages and sells loans, it needs to exchange a host of related documentation with investors. In the past, it was a challenge to manage all that content and deliver to the right people in a timely fashion.

Reginald L. Brown Sr., VP and electronic imaging manager, Residential Lending - Imaging and File Management, at Union Bank, explains, “Simply converting the original loan documents into electronic files took considerable time and expense. We had to ship the paper documents to a third-party contractor, then wait for them to scan the files and upload them to our content management system. It could take up to 15 days until the electronic files were available to our teams.”

While Union Bank had established a central enterprise content management (ECM) repository as its main system of record, the loan documents scanned by its contractor were uploaded to a separate repository. Employees often had to interact between the two systems to find all the documents related to a given loan, which led to delays and difficulty in tracking down information.

The bank realized that consolidating all the loan files in its main ECM system would greatly improve efficiency. But with around 800,000 document images in its other repository, the bank decided that a traditional migration process would be too costly and time-consuming.

Union Bank decided to deploy Lexmark’s Kofax Kapow, a platform that enables users to access and integrate data automatically into enterprise applications and processes. Kofax Kapow utilizes robotic process automation (RPA) for migrating enterprise content.

Brown says, “Thanks to Kofax Kapow, the migration couldn’t have been easier. We were able to move all 800,000 documents to our main ECM system in a matter of days. Without the solution, it probably would have taken several weeks to migrate everything—and the complexity of the project would have increased the cost significantly.”

Kofax Kapow helped the bank accelerate the process of making loan documentation available in electronic format. “The faster our teams can gather loan documentation, the faster they can turn around the packages that we present to investors,” Brown says. “This results in a more rapid time to revenue for our consumer lending business, improving cash flow and reducing cost per fund. The improved agility also helps us to react more quickly to changing market conditions and seize opportunities to make better deals with investors—all of which helps Union Bank to run a more profitable business.”

Brown concludes, “While we may have originally introduced Kofax Kapow to solve the specific challenge of migrating loan documentation, its flexibility has opened up a whole new set of opportunities for improving the way we manage content and automating processes that rely on this content. We are very excited to extend the solution into more areas of the business and explore all the possibilities that it has to offer.”

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