CREDIT UNION SAVES 1,000-PLUS HOURS PER YEAR WITH RPA CREDIT UNION BOTS

For credit unions, fintech platforms aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. There are tons of them out there, all purporting to solve a ton of problems digitally.

But they don’t live up to the hype. Not if you’re working in your credit union’s Deposit Operations group, and need to process new-account-opening applications submitted via these different fintech platforms.

Why? Despite all the whiz-bang technology and promises of centralization, fully 75 to 80 percent of account-opening applications arrive with information missing from them.

And so the supposedly automated platforms require a lot of manual intervention by humans: your credit union’s already-overworked staffers.

But what if you could take that burden off of those people? We’re not talking about fixing the inherent shortcomings in the fintech platforms themselves. (That’s the fintechs’ job.) We’re talking about robotic process automation or RPA. In other words, it’s now possible to “park an RPA bot” atop these tedious fintech-induced chores at your credit union, thanks to The Lab, North America’s undisputed credit union-automation authority.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how one credit union—an actual client of The Lab—accomplished this, and how their model can apply to your credit union, too, regardless of the systems and platforms you use. That’s right: RPA bots from The Lab are platform- and fintech-agnostic.

We’ve even created a little two-minute video about it, which you can view right here:

The amount of fintech-fixing work out there is as big as the number of fintech platforms. Bots from The Lab can work with any of them, including:

• Q2 Gro
• Mantl
• DocFox
• Blend
• Meridian
• Link
• Backbase
• nCino
• Terafina
• Others

The credit union, and bot, in this example (and shown in the video) are using Q2 Gro. Here, new-account applications originate from any of three sources:

• Via a branch location
• Online, directly from the applicant
• Via a mobile app

From there, the ones needing work fall into any of three different buckets:

• Incomplete
• Referred
• Pending

For this bot, it’s looking specifically at the first two buckets: “Incomplete” and “Referred.” And it has a series of tasks to complete for each kind. This is the exact tedious work that your Deposit Ops staffers are doing—and hating—every day. It’s little wonder that turnover is so high at credit unions lately.

The bot begins by logging into the fintech portal, with its own username and password, just like a person would. From there, it performs a search, navigating its way to the queue for the “Incomplete” and “Referred” applications.

For the “Incomplete” applications, the bot is trained to look for certain obvious information: Social Security number, date of birth, and account number. If any are missing, it sends an email to the member, directly from the account-opening system, requesting the missing information, and moves on to the next application in the queue… in less time than it takes you to read this sentence.

“Referred” applications (for online applications only) get a different robotic workflow. Here, the bot will not only validate the ID information, but it will also search the credit union’s document-management system to see if that account holder has any charge-off’s or bankruptcies. The credit union in the demo is using AEM as its document-management and imaging system, but bots from The Lab can use any, such as:

• AEM
• Fiserv Director
• Finastra Fusion LaserPro
• Jack Henry Synergy
• FIS Content Management
• Others

If, after looking up the member’s information, a charge-off or bankruptcy is found, the bot sets the application status to “Fraud” and moves it to the “Complete” queue.

LABOR-SAVING… AND CONSIDERATE, TOO

While the bot is working—searching the fintech app, accessing the document-management system, and sending emails—it’s also, in the background, working in Excel, too. It’s creating a list of everything it’s done. It creates and populates columns for:

• Application ID
• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Phone
• Application Status
• Promo Code
• RPA Status

That last column—“RPA Status”—is interesting. There, the bot writes in notes for its human “bosses,” such as: “No action taken,” or “Fraud – ID verification failed; declined email sent.”

And so after the bot blazes through each application in the queue, it emails its Excel sheet to the appropriate parties at the credit union. Human intervention, in other words, is now only required where it’s truly required.

This one bot makes up for fintech shortcomings, while increasing compliance and reducing fraud. Not only that, it hedges against employee turnover by freeing up over 1,000 hours of tedious labor, every single year.

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!