Streamlining electronic delivery of credit applications and sanctions by leveraging up-to-date customer information results in improved employee productivity and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) companies are faced with an ever-increasing demand for faster turnaround times and improved customer satisfaction.
At the same time, they are feeling the pressure to manage risk more effectively, make the best possible decisions when it comes to risk analysis of potential and current clients, lower service costs in order to remain competitive, and adhere to new legislative requirements.
Essentially, the future of these companies will, to a large extent, rest on their ability to provide real-time and error-free responses to real-time enquiries and requirements - at a customer service and managerial level.
When a large BFSI company based in South Africa realised that its existing process for knowing a customer's current exposure was manual, time-consuming and prone to error, it looked to implement an automated, online credit management system to address these new demands.
Webcom's IntelliCredit - a complete Straight Through Processing (STP) Credit Suite, was able to deliver this, and more. It not only helped to expedite the credit application management process, but also provided the foresight to understand the impact a change in the credit file would have on a borrower's credit rating.
The challenge
The BFSI company, which offers credit rating services throughout South Africa to diverse business types and sizes, receives thousands of applications from various departments within the overall business, including corporate, business banking, wealth, asset finance and mortgages, to name a few.
It lacked a centralised system for the management of these credit applications, which caused much frustration to its employees - those working on credit applications had to refer to paper files and various other resources to pull out relevant customer information. In the absence of an automated validation system, relationship managers had to approach customers again and again to ensure completion of their application, leaving room for human error and omissions.
From a management perspective, the need to comply with legislative requirements such as Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA), National Credit Act (NCA) BASEL II and the newly revised King III report meant that a centralised system was essential in order to identify businesses with higher risk concentrations and poorly performing exposures.
Credit rating based on accurate, real-time customer information was needed to easily balance the risk of offering the customer a good deal versus triggering a credit violation. Auditors/sanctioners required the ability to quickly analyse transactions to ensure correct procedures were in place. And finally, the ability to provide personalised feedback to the customer regarding their current/future exposure was needed in order to improve customer satisfaction.
The solution
With the aim of streamlining credit application management, the company acquired licences for IntelliCredit Complete STP Credit Suite from Webcom.
IntelliCredit is a Web-enabled STP credit approval and processing and ongoing management system. It is fully auditable, and driven by business processes to automate and manage credit applications from start to finish.
The IntelliCredit Suite includes a comprehensive data warehouse, a fully integrated risk model platform, as well as optional internal risk models, which allow the client to integrate with its proprietary sources - thereby leveraging previous IT investments.
Says Glen Miller, CEO of The Webcom Group: "The IntelliCredit product set can be fully customised according to the unique needs of the client in terms of layout, descriptions, lists and so on; and also offers multi-language and multi-currency support. The solution assists in reducing the risk ratings of any organisation, but is particularly beneficial for financial organisations - allowing them to keep less capital in reserve, or a lower 'capital requirement' and can be easily integrated with existing processes to speed implementation and delivery."
A detailed project plan was developed to implement IntelliCredit in a phase-wise manner; proposing changes to both systems and processes in order to achieve desired outcomes.
Recognising that a comprehensive solution required better data integration, IntelliCredit eliminated all of the manual data gathering and related calculations and integrated all relevant data into the centralised system.
Webcom Software worked closely with the client to develop role-based training interventions that allowed client staff to optimally utilise IntelliCredit.
The business benefits
Following the implementation of IntelliCredit's Complete Credit STP Suite, the BFSI company has been able to lower turnaround times, increase the number of credit applications being processed, improve resource management and better meet its customers' needs.
Increased accuracy, depth and timeliness of credit information allow for reduced turnaround time and improvement in the ability to make quick decisions. The new centralised system means that the company complies with legislative and regulatory requirements such as FICA, NCA, Basel II and the newly revised King III report, and that it can handle an increase in volume of credit applications without compromising on process compliance. In fact, through the implementation of the IntelliCredit Suite and another of our products, eGRC, a governance, risk and compliance tool, your financial institution would become fully Basel II compliant. Employees are easily able to access and update customer information, as well as quickly generate standardised reports - allowing them to have a single, complete view of the customer, which promotes more informed conversations. It puts staff in a better position to make a credit rating decision at any point in time.
Electronic submission of reports - from the bank relationship manager to the central finance capture unit to the auditor/sanctioner - reduces the 'to and from' response times, thereby enabling the bank relationship managers to respond timeously to any urgent requests the customer might have.
The IntelliCredit Suite also boasts an extremely low bandwidth requirement, resulting in a robust solution that can operate throughout South Africa and Africa in general, even in areas with poor Internet connectivity.
Overall benefits include increased customer and employee satisfaction, as well as the advantages that come with advanced analytics - real-time information for consolidated risk and opportunities across the entire credit business.
Share
Editorial contacts