Fintech platforms sure promise a lot: Plenty of new-account applications, served on a platter, to your credit union.
The reality isn’t quite so exciting. Sure, the fintech platforms can give you a lot of applications, but they don’t do anything about all of the applications that get declined.
That’s on you. Or, more specifically, on your overworked staff. What are commonly known as “rejection notes” are actually “adverse-action letters” that must be created as an essential part of the audit trail.
We’ll tell you how many of these the average regional credit union must process every day, in just a minute. But for now, think about this:
Every minute that your staff spends on these represents time away from member service… used instead to process dead-on-arrival applications from those fintech platforms.
If that’s not a soul-sucking waste of time and energy—or ideal candidate for automation in your credit union—then nothing is.
Fortunately, this chore can be automated, thus plugging all of those pesky fintech hype/reality gaps. It’s possible with robotic process automation (RPA) bots from The Lab, North America’s undisputed credit union-automation authority.
In this article, we’ll walk you through an actual adverse-action bot we recently created for a leading regional credit union. We’ve even created a little two-minute video of the bot, which you can view right here:
Before we dive into the details, we want to make something crystal clear: RPA credit union bots from The Lab can work with any fintech platform. So your credit union might be using Q2, MeridianLink, nCino, MANTL, FICO, newgen, and/or any others.
The bots don’t care. Similarly, they can use Excel, Outlook, and Word, and dive into your core (any core) and peripheral systems (any peripheral systems), just like a person would. In fact, bots are even set up with their own login and password for the chores they need to complete.
Unfortunately, a lot of applications that arrive at your credit union’s “doorstep” from the various fintech platforms are D.O.A., or dead on arrival. This dictates the bot’s first chore: Finding them.
As you can see in the video, the bot logs in to the fintech platform, where it filters for the desired date-range, and even selects the proper pull-down to find the declined applications.
Then the work begins. Remember: This is work that your staffers are performing—and dreading—right this very minute.
From the “Declined” list, the bot drills down to the first declined application. In the resulting screen, it extracts all of the information it will need to create the letter. This includes items such as application date, applicant name, tax ID, and more.
Then it searches to see if there’s a consumer and credit-reporting agency report on file for that declined application. If it finds one, it opens it, and then extracts more data, including the score. And it saves the report, as a PDF, to the appropriate shared drive.
Just like a person would, the bot then switches to Word. It opens a template (replete with the credit union’s logo at the top) and—and here’s the amazing part—populates it exactly as needed, based on that specific applicant’s information, credit report, and score. It checks all of the audit-trail boxes, such as providing the name and contact information of the credit agency, the score, and so on.
The bot then emails the customized letter directly to the applicant. And it saves a new PDF, which combines both the letter and the report, to the shared drive.
As if this weren’t enough “work” for the bot (that’s really a relative term, since bots don’t get tired or take breaks), it also creates an Excel report, detailing each application it processed and the actions it took. It then emails this Excel report directly to the team.
As we’d noted above, this is currently a ton of work for your credit union’s staff, which can be especially precarious amid a tight talent market.
At the credit union in this example, each letter takes seven to ten minutes to create. The credit union must create 90 of these, every day.
With the bot, life has changed. That’s because it saves 4,600 hours of labor, every single year.
The best way to appreciate this speed and game-changing power is to see it for yourself. We invite you to schedule your free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab. You’ll see real RPA credit union bots in action, see how we do all this from our U.S. offices in Houston, with nothing outsourced or offshored, and get all your questions answered by our friendly experts. Hedge your credit union against employee turnover. Eliminate errors and resulting losses. Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
