Many of your credit union’s loan interest rates are tied to those of other indexes: U.S. Treasury’s, Freddie Mac, FHLB, and so on.
Those rates change continually. And so your credit union must update its rates—monthly, weekly, and even daily. It’s an incredibly detailed chore that your staffers hate doing. It consumes tons of hours—up to 1,200 hours a year at many credit union—and, even worse, it invites lots of human errors. That’s extra costly when loans are at stake.
Fortunately, you can now automate the entire process of looking up those published loan rates, updating them in both your core and loan-origination systems, and even creating an audit trail as proof of your work. It’s refreshingly fast, easy, and painless, with robotic process automation, or RPA bots from The Lab, North America’s undisputed leader for credit union automation.
In this article, we’re going to explain how we’d set up actual index-rate-updating bots at a real credit union—and how we could do it at your credit union, as well. Regardless of the systems you use, The Lab—and the bots we install—are system-agnostic. If a person can sit at a computer and run those systems, so can a bot.
We’ve even made a little two-minute video to accompany this article, showing the bots at work; check it out right here above!
As we’d noted above, these interest rates change daily. Your job is to track them down where they’re published, copy them (without making a single mistake), and then upload those rates into your selected systems.
That’s exactly what the bot in this example will do.
First, the bot logs into the appropriate sites that house the up-to-date interest rates; for your credit union, the bot can visit any sites you choose. In this example, the bot starts on the website of the Wall Street Journal, where it looks up U.S. Treasury’s. All of the info is there:
- 30-Year Bond
- 10-Year Note
- 7-Year Note
- 5-Year Note
- 3-Year Note
- 2-Year Note
- 1-Year Bill
- 6-Month Bill
- 3-Month Bill
- 1-Month Bill
Each one of those—that’s a total of ten, in case you weren’t counting—has its own discrete interest rate.
The bot quickly grabs a screen-shot of the page. (Why? We’ll explain in a minute.)
Next, it’s on to the next site: Freddie Mac, and navigates to the “H.15 Selected Interest Rates” table. This is the exact same (numbingly boring) page that a credit unionstaffer would ordinarily go to. Like the Wall Street Journal page, it’s swimming with interest rates. Again, the bot takes a screen-shot of the page. (Again, we’ll explain why shortly.)
Finally, the bot navigates to the website of the regional FHLB, the Federal Home Loan Bank. Again, it finds the rates it needs, and grabs a quick screen shot.
Wall Street Journal, Freddie Mac, FHLB… those are just the examples for this specific credit union. Remember: RPA bots from The Lab can fetch info from any site or source you choose.
In this example, the bot next logs into Fiserv Precision, the credit union’s account-processing platform, with its own login and password, just like a person. Bots from The Lab can work with any core, including those from FIS and Jack Henry. They can also work with any loan system, including:
- Fiserv Precision or Signature
- FIS Horizon
- Jack Henry Silverlake Xperience, Symitar Episys
- Others
Once in the system, the bot selects the option to update loan adjustable rates. And here’s the amazing part: The bot uses intelligent data processing to actually read the information from the web pages it accessed! It dives through the menus in the loan system and types in each new rate, flawlessly, at lightning speed.
For example, for “1 Week LIBOR,” it types in an updated index rate of “0.08413000”; think that’s easy for a person? And it’s just one of several rates it types in, without slowing, pausing, or taking breaks.
Remember those screen shots of the different sites we’d mentioned earlier? This is where they come into play. In this example, the RPA bot logs into Fiserv Director, the credit union’s document-management system. Remember, however, that bots from The Lab can use any document-management and imaging system, including:
- Fiserv Director
- Finastra Fusion LaserPro
- Jack Henry Synergy
- FIS Content Management
- Others
And why is it logging into the document system? It’s uploading the screen shots as proof of the actual published rates. So not only is it creating an audit trail, but it’s “paving it smoothly,” since when it uploads each image, it parks it in just the right network drive and folder, even giving it a nice, unique, rational filename. Pretty thoughtful!
Since the bot is so fast, and so silent and thoroughly uncomplaining, you might not know when it’s working. So the bot, once it’s done updating the rates and uploading the screen shots, sends out an email to the appropriate recipients in the credit union, letting them know that the work is completed.
And it’s a lot of work. This one bot alone saves 800 to 1,200 hours of tedious labor, year after year—while protecting the credit union against employee turnover. (Who, after all, considers “typing in interest rates” to be part of a fulfilling career?) It’s a win-win, for both the credit union and its staffers.
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!
