Credit Unions: Save 300 to 4,600 hours/year on all of those commercial loans
If only the different systems in your credit union talked to one another, there wouldn’t be a need for this article, nor the problem it solves.
But as a credit union professional, you know that’s not the case. Take commercial loans. They begin their lives in your credit union’s loan-origination system or LOS, if you even have one. But all of that information—loan amount, borrower and guarantor data, collateral, interest rate, payment schedule, and so on—needs to get uploaded, field-by-tedious-field, into your credit union’s core system.
Then there’s the document-management system, where all of the original paperwork must get uploaded.
Today, all of this is done by your credit union’s overworked commercial-loan operations staff.
Tomorrow, it should be automated!
That’s right: You can now “park a bot” on this essential, detailed, and error-prone activity with robotic process automation or RPA bots from The Lab. We’re North America’s credit union automation, process-improvement, and standardization authority, with three decades of experience serving credit unions just like yours.
What is commercial loan boarding robotic process automation? The definition of RPA for loan boarding is the implementation and configuration of automation software like Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, or Automation Anywhere to mimic the human steps being performed in front of a computer at the user-interface level.
In this article, we’re going to describe how powerful a bot like this is—and yet how quickly and easily The Lab can configure and implement it for you in your loan operations department. The bot (and credit union) in this article are taken from an actual client of The Lab, which we’ve anonymized here.
We’ve even created a cool little (equally anonymized) two-minute example video of robotic process automation for commercial loan boarding, showing that bot in action, which you can view right here:
In many ways, credit union RPA bots are like human workers. They can “sit at a computer” and log into different applications. They can type, click, copy, and paste. They even have their own usernames, passwords, and pre-set permissions from IT.
Yet in other ways, they’re nothing like human workers at all… which can get pretty amazing. Check it out:
The bot in our video starts by gathering all the closed loan data it needs. That’s actually trickier than it sounds, because it needs access to the credit union’s network drive. It needs to know which folder to search. It needs to know which Excel sheet to open. All of that is automated with the RPA bot.
In this case, the bot is opening what this credit union calls its “Loan Boarding Sheet” that has been approved by an attorney. But other credit unions—perhaps yours—may use an extract from the loan-origination system or LOS. No problem: Credit union bots from The Lab can be configured to use any source of input.
So far, the bot seems to be merely emulating a human. It opens the Loan Boarding sheet. Big deal.
But then—brace yourself—it memorizes the entire thing.
You read right.
No human can do that. For the bot, it’s easy; it simply loads the entire thing into its memory. It closes the Loan Boarding sheet and moves on, never needing to park different windows side-by-side so it can copy-and-paste. That kind of work is so… human.
Now, armed with all of this commercial-loan information, the RPA bot logs into the core. You’ve probably guessed this by now, but we want to stress the point:
Credit union bots from The Lab can work with whatever core your credit union uses. It could be from FIS, Fiserv, or Jack Henry. Our credit union bots are core-agnostic.
In this credit union RPA bot example, the bot is using FIS Horizon.
Once it logs in (remember: with its own username and password, just like a person), it navigates to the “Loan System New Account Entry” section, and searches by account number.
Once it finds the first account it needs, it gets to work. Using the information it had memorized from that Loan Boarding sheet, it starts populating data fields at blistering speed:
• It adds borrowers.
• It adds guarantors.
• It updates the loan amount.
• It enters the interest rate.
• It updates the maturity date.
Next, it completes the payment schedule:
• It types in the frequency.
• It updates the number of payments.
• It types in the dollar amount of each payment.
It’s not done. It next updates the escrow, if the account requires it. It completes the fields for “Automatic Transfer Maintenance.”
And it types in all of the crucial collateral information, too, even adding flags for IRS 1098 reporting when required.
Once it’s done all this, it completes its work in the core by filling out all of the post-loan updates.
Remember how we’d mentioned that bots differ from humans in good ways? Here’s another: During all of this typing—we’re talking about dozens of detailed fields here—the bot never slows down, gets tired, takes breaks, or even makes a single typo.
The bot’s not done. Now it shifts to the document-management system, where it uploads all of the docs from this commercial loan.
And that’s just the first loan from the original list in the Excel sheet! The bot then does a “lather, rinse, repeat” on all of the others, at lightning speed, until it’s completed the list.
Is it done at that point? Nope. It still has one more task to perform:
Once it’s completed all of its data-memorizing and uploading, it then emails the loan officer, underwriter, and other process owners, letting them know it completed its work. It also notifies them of any exceptions or missing documentation that’s still required.
This one bot can save the average-sized credit union anywhere from 500 to 10,000 hours of difficult labor every year, while freeing up team members for more fulfilling tasks. That improves morale—and helps prevent staff turnover.
Even better, The Lab was able to install this bot, start to finish, in just weeks.
We have implemented thousands of bots for credit unions just like yours, all around the USA. We can discover all of the most valuable robotic process automation use-cases for your credit union within weeks. We can implement dozens within a few months.
Many other use cases are available for quick implementation:
• Currency Transaction Report Robotic Process Automation for Credit Unions
• Mobile Deposit Account Setup Robotic Process Automation for Credit Unions
• Flood Reporting for Real Estate Loans Robotic Process Automation for Credit Unions
• Fraud Detection System Processing Robotic Process Automation for Credit Unions
• Loan Index Rate Robotic Process Automation for Credit Unions
Be sure to subscribe to The Lab’s YouTube channel to see our frequent uploads where we showcase the most recent automations we have implemented.
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!