Banking and Finance

Improving straight-through processing by 40% for a leading mortgage servicing company with Scout

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The Challenge

A leading mortgage servicing company in the U.S., with 2 subsidiaries and more than 6,000 employees, faced critical challenges in its underwriting function.

The workload for lending underwriters varied significantly, leading to overwork, errors, miscalculations, missed SLAs, and, consequently, customer dissatisfaction. These issues adversely affected the company’s reputation in the competitive market.

Industry

Financial Services

Location

United States

6,000

Employees

2

Subsidiaries

Attempted Solution before Scout

About

1,000 hours

required from the business teams for discovery workshops

The firm appointed a SWAT team to “find and fix this problem,” but their initial solutions fell short. Despite deploying a process mining solution and conducting ‘discovery workshops’ to understand the team’s work patterns, these methods did not provide a comprehensive view of the underlying issues.
The extensive time required from the business teams for these workshops—about 1,000 hours—further strained the already overburdened staff, leading to increased stress and attrition.

Enter

Group 10162

The Head of Process Excellence decided to implement Scout, to find and fix the firm’s challenges. Scout was deployed swiftly, integrating seamlessly without the need for complex adjustments to the existing systems.

Scout revealed crucial insights within the

first week

Scout’s AI to “find and fix”

Scout’s AI to “find and fix”

Step 1: Find

Immediately after deployment, Scout revealed crucial insights within the first week:

Only 60% of the underwriters’ time was dedicated to core underwriting tasks.

Harvard Business Review

Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?

The startling statistic that underwriters toggled between applications and documents 800-1,000 times a day, due to unintegrated systems and fragmented data, pointed to a massive work recall gap highlighting the disparity between the team’s understanding of how work is being done and how work was actually being done.

The analysis also found a heavy reliance on manual processes and “shadow IT” systems, like Excel spreadsheets, which were inefficient and time-consuming.

Harvard Business Review

How Much Time Does Having Too Many Apps Really Waste?

Step 2: Fix

Armed with these insights, the firm quickly implemented targeted solutions:

Quick Fixes

Training sessions were conducted to elevate the entire team's performance to the level of the most experienced members

A central repository for
underwriting calculators and
templates was created

Deep Fixes

The leadership initiated a digital transformation initiative to design an end-to-end workflow system, reducing the disconnection debt by integrating disparate systems and streamlining processes. An intelligent underwriting assistant was also introduced, further enhancing productivity and accuracy.

Harvard Business Review

What’s Lost When Data Systems Don’t Communicate

Business outcomes

With Scout’s intervention, the mortgage firm achieved remarkable improvements:

Straight-through processing improved by

40%

Productivity of lending underwriters increased by

30%

Operational costs were reduced by

15%

Key operating principles

Scout’s deployment was driven by principles that are essential to every success story:

Empathy at the Core:
It is important to note that in all of these recommendations, privacy was of the utmost importance – and no employee data was shared. Empathy was at the core of all recommendations and the focus was on addressing and improving the core issues i.e., getting teams to work together across functions, fixing disconnected systems, and simplifying and optimizing work processes.

Continuous Visibility and Improvement:

Scout was an integral part of this transformation, providing continuous visibility and enabling ongoing improvements.

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How AI connects interaction data to business outcomes

Your business generates billions of data points from human-machine interactions. Scout, our AI model, deciphers this interaction data to unveil what often remains unseen—the hidden challenges your teams face at work and how they affect business outcomes, whether it's cost optimization, revenue growth, customer or employee experience, or business continuity.

The AI then provides data-based recommendations for the necessary interventions to address these challenges, paving the way for improved outcomes.

We call this lighting up the ‘dark side of the moon’.
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Forbes

The 'Dark Side Of The Moon' In Enterprises

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