Free up your staff and save 200 to 700 hours from the error-prone drudgery of monitoring data, risk alerts, and more.
Two acts of Congress provided lots of safeguards for consumers… while adding a ton of regulatory pressure on credit unions and their staffs. These are the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act or HMDA, and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act or RESPA.
The former, HMDA, requires that mortgage lenders maintain certain records; while the latter, RESPA, requires lenders, mortgage brokers, and home-loan servicers to provide borrowers with disclosures about the nature and costs of their real-estate settlement.
And since these are federal laws, there’s a lot of reporting required for compliance. It goes without saying that the penalties for lapses can be steep. And of course, there’s always the built-in ticking clock of reporting timelines and deadlines.
If your credit union’s staff is still manually processing compliance tasks for HMDA and/or RESPA—and you know they are—then there are stunning benefits to be reaped, quickly and easily, by automating many of these processes and their component activities.
In this case study, we will show how The Lab was able to bring automation to both HMDA and RESPA compliance, using robotic process automation or RPA. The RPA “bots” which we configured are now saving these credit unions thousands of hours of error-prone effort each year… while freeing up staff for higher-value tasks, eliminating human error, and boosting member experience thanks to improved speed and responsiveness… all at the same time.
At this credit union, the HMDA compliance data-transfer and -monitoring process was laborious. That’s an understatement: To complete the monthly HMDA reconciliation, the credit union’s Quality Assurance Manager would spend about 15 to 20 hours per month reconciling HMDA data entry, using an Encompass (loan-origination system) and Mavent (compliance system) exceptions report.
For each application, the manager would need to confirm that all HMDA data fields are complete with no errors. This kind of manual “stare-and-compare” or “swivel-chair” validation and reconciliation activity is an ideal candidate for robotic process automation or RPA.
The “Before” state of affairs was incredibly manual; consider the workflow illustrated below:
Note that every one of these steps was performed by a person. What if that person quits?
However, with a bot on the job, things get faster and are 100-percent automated. That’s because the bot is programmed to:
Now take a look at the “After” workflow, which has been massively “bot-ified”:
Thanks to the new RPA bot installed by The Lab, this credit union is now able to:
Importantly, this activity, which would take the Quality Assurance Manager 15 to 20 hours per month, is now performed by the bot with no human intervention. The bot took over all the “stare-and-compare” tasks. And it’s 30 times faster and makes no mistakes—it buys back those 15 to 20 hours for the Quality Assurance Manager, month after month.
Different regulation, same headaches. That was the “Before” scenario for this credit union, prior to The Lab’s RESPA automation intervention:
At this credit union, the Quality Assurance Manager would consume about 30 hours per week manually processing Encompass alerts for potential RESPA violations. For each alert—and we’re talking nearly 250 per day!—the manager must enter the loan number into Encompass, and then verify six data fields between the loan file and the documentation that triggered the alert. These are elements such as member name, income, SSN, property address, property value, and request amount.
Just take a look at the “Before” state in this diagram. It should make your head spin:
Now look at how simple it all is, with an RPA bot from The Lab:
Now, instead of the Quality Assurance Manager, it’s a never-gets-tired bot that performs the following steps:
Remember: This manual state-and-compare drudgery was costing the Quality Assurance Manager about 30 hours a week. The bot has freed up all this human capacity for higher-value tasks.
Credit Union executives are turning to The Lab to accelerate automation/AI readiness, lay the groundwork for strategic end-to-end process/product innovation, and implement Robotic Process Automation (RPA) “bots” to automate dozens of processes. With as few as three RPA bots from The Lab, you, too, can begin implementing on your company-wide strategic innovation roadmap—and start seeing hard-dollar benefits within weeks.
The best way to appreciate the speed and game-changing power of the automation suites installed by The Lab is to see it for yourself. Schedule a free, no-obligation 30-minute screen-sharing demo with The Lab, and you’ll see RPA bots in action. You’ll learn 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 company against employee turnover, eliminate errors, and put your organization on a roadmap to accelerate your automation and AI initiatives.
Simply call (201) 526-1200 or email info@thelabconsulting.com to book your demo today!
