When speed and accuracy are crucial, manual processes are the enemy

In the commercial loans department of one of the world’s largest banks, a team of highly-skilled employees were tasked with manually checking the covenant certificates and financial statements of their customers against long and complex contracts. Due to the lack of technological tools, the team struggled to maintain the level of accuracy needed for such an important and compliance-centric task and transferring knowledge to colleagues was difficult. 

Combining business knowledge with intelligent automation

Endava were tasked with turning this fully manual, error-prone, expensive and time-consuming activity into a highly efficient, automated and intelligent one. The solution was to start with the agreement between the bank and their customers. By building an intelligent automation platform with the capability to digitise and interpret the bank’s contracts using optical character recognition, machine learning and natural language processing, a robust set of covenant data can be created.

Then, as each certificate or financial statement is received, it is analysed using the same technology on the platform, which compares the values to the rules included in each contract, intelligently identifying if the covenant is satisfied or if it needs attention from one of the bank’s specialist employees. The platform learns each time an employee enters new information, without them needing to be experts in machine learning. 

Predicting a brighter future

The immediate benefits of the project are impressive. OpEx decreased by up to 75% and processing volume has increased significantly thanks to the decrease in manual processes. Thanks to the data produced through process automation, compliance and auditability are improved. The bank’s team of skilled employees have been freed up to do more interesting and valuable work and their overall job satisfaction has doubled.

Looking forward, the automation platform has the capability to support:
■  real-time monitoring - warning the team of contract breach as soon as a document is loaded into the system
■  predictive monitoring – providing an early warning system based on a predictive machine learning model, to highlight trends that will allow the bank to intervene before a customer is no longer able to sustain their repayments
■  improved compliance – through automated evaluation of credit risk based on forward looking impairment 

Reimagining the relationship between people and technology and embracing digital technology evolution has opened up new avenues that help to enhance the bank’s service offering to their customers, improve the careers of their employees and promote future innovation which should continue to decrease risk and improve profitability.