Industry Solutions: Lending

The Challenge

In today’s financial services marketplace, the process of lending money to consumers and businesses can often be complex and people intensive. Much of the revenue earned from charges, specifically on short term arrangements, is spent acquiring, setting up and administering accounts. Even on longer term agreements, the complex product choices that lenders have to offer to remain competitive, have an impact on the manual servicing effort required and subsequently the profit realised from the loans. The price at which products can be sold is also hampered by the cost of administration, so lenders with lower cost bases can offer the most competitive products.

The customer acquisition process can be challenging and costly. A customers perception of a company is often shaped by their first experience of dealing with them. If a lender doesn’t m'eet the expectations of customers and prospects, then business can often end up with the competition. Having the capability to maintain customer satisfaction and mitigate churn is an essential requirement in today’s competitive lending industry.

Once a customer is established, keeping them for the duration of a long term agreement is challenging, with competitive organisations constantly attempting to attract customers to their products with a variety of tempting offers. A wide ranging cross industry survey carried out in the USA highlighted that 68% of customers left due to ‘attitude of indifference’. By identifying ‘at risk’ customers by spotting trends in activity, organisations can initiate retention strategies to maintain their revenue base.

The AWD Solution

AWD provides a proven and scalable process management solution that can help both general lending companies and mortgage providers increase service efficiency whilst lowering the cost of processing work. Using a two dimensional process paradigm, the ‘horizontal’ distribution of work throughout an organisation can be optimised using rules and prioritisation. Coupled with that, the ‘vertical’ activities that either people or systems perform as part of a process can be orchestrated to deliver automation and user assistance where it is most effective.

At all stages in both processes and customer engagement, events are recorded so that a full audit trail is available along with management information around performance and efficiency.

AWD also provides a comprehensive content services capability as an integral component to the product set. This provides document and content management facilities to handle customer communications such as inbound and outbound paper correspondence, email, fax, phone and SMS.

AWD Client Benefits

By automating many activities that are traditionally performed by full time staff, organisations can drive inefficiency out of the business. This in turn can lower the cost per customer overhead which allows organisations to be more profitable and competitive.

By delivering timely responses to prospects and existing customers, the risk of abandoned acquisition or churn is lessened and the potential for product ‘up sell’ increases.

By providing visibility of all customer data, correspondence and activity, it can help enable lenders to deliver the right level of service to the customer at the right time. By understanding trends in customer behaviour and using pre-built integration capability to services such as credit agencies, lenders can deploy acquisition and retention mechanisms to grow and maintain revenue bases.

Using the integrated AWD analytics engine, organisations can implement propensity strategies to optimise earnings from existing and new customers.

Some examples from clients of results achieved with the help of DST Global Solutions process management include:

• Reduced the cost of handling claims by 35% over a 2-3 year period.
• 42% reduction in FTE headcount.
• Processed over 250,000 work items per quarter, with 86% of these items being successfully completed with no user intervention.
• One client staff member was able to handle 5000 insurance policies at any once time compared to the industry norm of 450.

Related Products

• AWD

  To succeed in today’s corporate business environment organisations must harness the right resources and technology to deliver optimised process efficiency, quality and customer service.