How AI and Automation are Reshaping a Bank's Mortgage Division
Mortgages are one of the most high-stakes, emotionally charged, and complex journeys in financial services. For clients, the process is too often a maze of paperwork, repeated questions, and anxious waiting. For institutions, it’s a drain on resources: hundreds of back-office staff review the same documents, adding notes upon notes, with systems that don’t talk to each other.
As one Director of Process Engineering described it,
“The average file has like 90 or 100 notes that are each three or four lines long. So it becomes this sort of labyrinth of information that no one can decipher.”
The cost of that complexity is enormous. Mortgages remain profitable, but they could be far more efficient if institutions could reduce the rework, the repeated touchpoints, and the sheer volume of human effort required to move a file from start to finish.
The Challenge: Confronting a Legacy Labyrinth
The institution’s goal is bold: modernize its entire mortgage application and approval process to address deep-seated challenges with old technology and inefficient workflows. Executives were frustrated by the slow, expensive process, which seemed simple to an outsider but was incredibly complex internally due to systems that don't communicate well. The bank's solution is to move toward a more automated, cloud-based platform.
This isn't your average tech refresh; it's a fundamental overhaul of how the bank's mortgage division operates. The project aims to:
- Streamline the Front End: By changing the way information is received and providing structured fields like drop-downs and radio buttons, the bank can minimize errors and reduce back-and-forth communication with clients.
- Leverage AI and Automation: New AI tools will read and validate documents like T4s, populating information automatically to prevent manual mistakes. The bank is also exploring AI-enabled decision engines to provide rapid loan adjudication.
- Reduce Human Touchpoints: The ultimate goal is to move all information gathering to the beginning of the process, which will reduce the number of times a single document is handled by different people, cutting costs and saving time.
The stakes are high. While mortgages are very profitable for the bank, they could be even more so with a leaner back office. However, the biggest challenge is regulatory and risk aversion, as there must always be a human in the loop to check the machine's work.
Sourcing the Right Talent for a Digital Evolution
This transformation isn't just about the technology; it’s about the talent required to execute it. While the team has traditionally been comprised of industrial engineers, the project demands a broader skillset to navigate the complexities of automation, compliance, and user experience. The team is now seeking individuals with:
- Tech Savviness: People with a strong technical background who can bridge the gap between business needs and complex engineering.
- Creative and Business Acumen: Individuals with backgrounds in service design or who can balance hard engineering skills with an understanding of business operations.
- Relevant Industry Experience: Consultants with experience from large, complex organizations like hospitals, insurance companies, and retail giants, where they've dealt with similar challenges around logistics, regulation, and large-scale legacy tech.
The bank faces a unique challenge in finding mid-level talent—those with three or four years of experience—who are hard to attract given the stability but non-startup-level compensation. There is also a significant need for talent with actual, hands-on experience in AI, rather than just a conceptual understanding.
Our Contribution: Powering the Transformation
We didn't just fill roles; we mobilized specialized consultants with the technical depth and enterprise delivery experience to tackle one of the bank's most ambitious projects. Recognizing the need for a diverse skill set, we provided:
- Engineers with Business Acumen: Professionals capable of bridging the gap between back-end processes and front-end usability, with experience in large, regulated environments.
- Experienced Mid-Level Talent: Consultants with three to four years of relevant experience from similar industries, who can hit the ground running and contribute immediately.
- AI Specialists: Experts who understand the practical application of AI and can help build proof-of-concepts to demonstrate the technology’s effectiveness.
Our collaborative screening and onboarding processes helped the bank find the right fit at speed, bringing in talent who can navigate the complexities of compliance, internal risk aversion, and vendor management.
“We need the ability to have make changes that are configurable…That's what kills us is the duration of everything that it takes to actually do anything.”
The Goal: A Future-Proofed Mortgage Process
A multi-year transformation is now in motion, with a clear path to modernize how a major financial institution handles its mortgage business. By capturing data more accurately and earlier in the process, the bank can provide a better customer experience. The long-term benefits include:
- Increased Speed and Ease: Reducing multiple back-and-forth meetings and enabling faster decisions for clients, which is crucial in a competitive housing market.
- Improved Efficiency: Creating a leaner, more profitable back-office by minimizing manual tasks and freeing up hundreds of people.
- Enhanced Customer Relationship: The mortgage application is a key "moment of truth" that can lead to a long-term, multi-product client relationship if the experience is exceptional.
This project isn't just about improving a single process; it's about fundamentally transforming the bank's operational model and positioning it for a more digital, data-driven future.
“I think the biggest thing for us is can we build the technology so that we can get some proof of concepts up and running… Actually put it into place and run some deals through to see what it looks like.”
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