Reinventing Mortgage Loan Origination Through Intelligent Automation
Case Study at a Glance
- Client: Regional Mortgage Lender
- Size: Medium (100–500 employees)
- Industry: Financial Services
- Deliverables: UiPath Proof of Concept, Automation Feasibility Assessment, & Strategic Roadmap
The Opportunity
A regional mortgage lender engaged Main Digital to execute a UiPath RPA Proof of Concept (POC). Further, the client leveraged Main Digital’s detailed, intelligent automation methodology to assess automation feasibility, build the business case, facilitate alignment on prioritized processes, and structure into a comprehensive, integrated strategic plan.
The Main Digital Solution
Proof of Concept
Main Digital conducted a POC with the client team to demonstrate RPA’s capabilities. A POC showcases the platform’s ability to automate a process in the client’s environment. Main Digital led a discovery lab with the client to select a disclosure process as the use case for automation. Next, leveraging secure access, the Main Digital team successfully developed the automation remotely. The result of the POC allowed the stakeholders to see how automation will work in their environment and specifically with its loan origination platform, Encompass® by Ellie Mae®. Further, it built confidence and excitement for an enterprise-wide automation program with little investment.
Automation Feasibility Assessments
Main Digital completed a series of Automation Feasibility assessments to determine the feasibility, readiness, and value of automation for processes under consideration. The work included creating a high–level, future–state design to identify the steps to be automated, identifying fundamental changes that may need to be made to enable automation, and determining if any steps within the processes are deemed out of scope for automation. The assessment also included the task of estimating the preliminary complexity and level of effort required to implement or automate the candidate process using RPA and to maintain post-implementation.
Business Case Model
Main Digital structured a scenario–based business case model to determine the preliminary quantitative and qualitative impact on the client. Main Digital considered all costs (fully loaded cost per FTE, software, third–party resources, business growth, etc.). Further, Main Digital reviewed all quantitative benefits and modeled the proposed strategies’ impact (capacity added, IRR, NPV, etc.). In addition, Main Digital identified significant risks, issues, uncertainties, and assumptions which were used when building the business case.
Strategic Roadmap
Main Digital built a strategic roadmap by aligning with stakeholders on the processes prioritized for automation and by leveraging both the automation feasibility assessment and business case throughout the loan origination journey. The team determined the timeline to implement the processes selected for automation in addition to other supporting workstreams (e.g., infrastructure setup). Main Digital clarified critical activities not included in the strategic roadmap that will need to be addressed to ensure the client team had all the information they needed to execute their automation strategy and plan.
Lasting Results
By automating the disclosure process, the client was able to perform a portion of the process in under 2.5 minutes on average, which represents a time savings of 50% per loan. Further, Main Digital provided an automation strategy and assessment framework to evaluate automation readiness and tangible benefits. As a result, the client found that some processes it thought should be automated were not good candidates, while others were simpler to automate than they had initially thought.
After successfully conducting a Proof-of-Concept, Automation Feasibility Assessment, and completing a Strategic Roadmap, the estimated net savings and productivity gains for the automation program was valued at nearly $1M.
One of the most important aspects that made this project successful was the involvement of the client teams. The Main Digital team worked with the process owners and the individuals using the automation solution on most of the deliverables. The approach enabled Main Digital to get buy–in from the client team along the journey, who also learned more about RPA and are now more informed and excited as automation solutions are deployed to production.