Banking and Finance
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
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”
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.
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.
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.
Strategic Payoff
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.
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’.
