In many areas of the country, the housing market is starting to bounce back. New-home sales are surging, and home prices are rising. This upswing in housing demand is exerting a great deal of pressure on financial services organizations to meet consumer demand for a superior mortgage lending experience.

Since the 2008 recession, lending regulations have increased dramatically, with almost 1,000 compliance changes implemented during the last eight years. Greater scrutiny of regulatory compliance has made it difficult to keep loan production costs in check. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the combination of increasing regulations and manual efforts to ensure compliance, have resulted in U.S. mortgage origination costs that are three times higher than they were a decade ago.

But your customers have little patience for the laundry list of regulations or the increasing operational burdens that have lengthened loan turnaround times—they expect their loan applications to be processed and approved quickly and accurately. Delays lead to dissatisfaction and disengagement. When you consider that, on average, it now takes 45 days for a loan to be approved, you can see there is room for improvement.

Welcome to the New World in Mortgage Lending

But imagine if there was a brand new world in your mortgage operations:  a tool that could easily enhance your ability to provide efficient and error-free mortgage lending services; a way to automate those repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks that zap productivity in your operations.

What if your knowledge workers—freed from entering loan data manually into multiple systems and vendor sites, retyping communications for borrowers and loan officers, and separating and saving documents into repositories—could instead devote their time to better customer service and other high-value activities?

It’s a reality with robotic process automation…..

How to Put Intelligent Software Robots to Work

Although the term “robotic process automation” or RPA might evoke an image of a shiny metal robot stealing your chair and taking over your keyboard, it is actually a software-based solution. With RPA, an intelligent software robot is configured to perform tasks previously performed manually by a person. RPA software is best-suited to take over “swivel chair” processes, where employees read data from one screen and key it into another. RPA interacts with other software and computer systems just like a human employee would—except a robot can do the work faster and cheaper, with fewer errors. And they can work 24/7 without a coffee break.

Software robots can be deployed to quickly and efficiently handle various mortgage lending tasks, such as monitoring emails, pulling in data from various internal systems and reconciling data between enterprise content management and loan origination systems. The elimination of manual errors and rework helps reduce operational costs and a more streamlined quality control and verification process improves compliance.  Customers receive their loan offers faster and are much happier with their lending experience.

RPA also plays quite well with others. It does not disturb any of your underlying systems and scales easily. RPA technology integrates with your core banking applications, so there’s no need to rip and replace your existing infrastructure. Robots interact with external online services by simply interacting with these web site portals just like your bank employees are doing today.  And no coding is required: you can put robots to work in a matter of weeks, not months, to realize significant productivity and efficiency gains.

Realizing Your RPA Opportunity

Leveraging software robots can help you meet loan quality, compliance and cost challenges head on—and realize a faster time to revenue for your lending business.

Case in point: Union Bank leveraged RPA to significantly improve its loan processes, resulting in a reduction in turnaround time for digitizing loan documents from 15 to 5 days; automation of post-closing processes to streamline loan file auditing; and the migration of 800,000 documents to ECM systems in a matter of days, not months.

Ready to dig deeper into the many ways RPA can revolutionize your mortgage lending processes? For more insights on how RPA can help you deliver a swift and seamless experience that builds customer loyalty, download our e-Paper: Forecasting Your Future: How Financial Institutions Are Improving Operations: 3 Ways to Transform Your Business Using Robotic Process Automation.