The Client
Our client is one of the largest mortgage lenders in the UK, with a lending portfolio of over £180 billion. Since each of the 4 mortgage books has individual processes and systems, the ecosystem was proving overly complex for their ~25000 active brokers. Approvals would take up to 21 days and mortgage disbursals would take another few months. The brokers would have to log into multiple systems, remember quite a few passwords and repeatedly reach out to the call center for progress updates of their customer’s mortgage application.
Accelerating digitalization and mitigating obsolescence risk has been the bank’s future vision. Recognizing the importance of the mortgage line of business and listening to the broker community, the bank decided to invest and provide an enhanced and seamless experience across web and mobile to their brokers.
Coforge Approach
The bank analyzed multiple options with Coforge. Keeping the bank’s cloud architecture vision in focus, Coforge proposed abstracting the data and information systems on mainframe through core APIs and serverless technology on cloud. Each line of Business would then be able to build their own APIs for their various services and products.
The Mortgage, Lending and Banking customer application processing services are being developed on Salesforce. A dynamic logic framework was developed for customer service processing. This consists of sets of configurable, reusable, and editable Q&A, which allows the bank to orchestrate and sequence the set of the questions being presented to the brokers, based on the desired user journeys. Custom elements can also be introduced by the administrator as required.
We are also building an error framework with help messages and general questions for the convenience of the customers. The system administrator now can add or amend journeys in real time with audit and versioning for the journey templates as well as each individual mortgage application.
Result
Once fully deployed, the new broker facing unified platform will do away with the requirement of manual case creation across the Mortgage, Lending and Banking services. There will be an end-to-end fundamental change. The broker journeys will be intuitive, simple easy, have single sign on facility, work on smartphones and laptops, offer self-service options to the brokers with an enhanced user experience.
User journeys can be added, amended, or re-arranged quickly, leading to reduction in effort and cost of delivering these solutions. The pain of adding custom elements has gone and there is greater flexibility to deliver an enhanced experience.
By answering a few questions, the broker can immediately get a response if the mortgage proposal will be approved or not. Brokers will have immediate access to information, whether they are using their smartphone or laptop. They can view the progress of every mortgage application, schedule tasks, connect with their relationship managers and view products. In fact, during the pandemic, the intuitive Q&A assisted the users to explore different combinations of term/ EMI and be able to request restructuring their mortgages to get through the difficult times. Also, now customers can seamlessly change mortgage deals online. A seamless customer experience has resulted in customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Lead generation can be optimized. The single datastore will present a single source of truth for customer data analytics, resulting in potential cross selling opportunities and additional customer insights.
Mortgage related traffic on the call center reduced by 70%. Through data analytics we make continuous changes to the user journeys have observed journey completion improved by 40%.
Soon these services will be integrated with Bank’s Mobile App and mortgage details will be just a click away with a smarter and easy to use interface.
Presently third-party system is used for letter printing which will be replaced with new system for all customer communication for instance Redemption, Arrears, Insurance, Litigation, Underwriting letters and many more. Gradually all the communication letters on mainframe application will be using new application for desired letter printing with prescribed template. This will result in centralized system for customer communication with reduced operational cost.
The Salesforce cloud will provide the necessary high availability and resilience with the flexibility of reusability, leading to reduction in effort and faster turnaround time.
