Monmouthshire Building Society cuts time for applications with automated mortgage processing

Monmouthshire Building Society has provided mortgages to homebuyers in England and Wales for over 150 years. The Society set an ambitious plan to build an efficient, future-oriented operating model and offer a digital experience to attract and retain homebuyers. It was key to respond quickly to new mortgage applications. However, new mortgage product offers often generated a large volume of applications—and a bottleneck—while colleagues manually worked through each application. To remove the bottleneck, the Society turned to Blue Prism® Cloud.

Challenge

Savvy homebuyers are on the lookout for the best mortgage rate, and Monmouthshire Building Society has just the right offers for them. When they offered a new and enticing product, the Society often saw a sharp uptick in applications—especially those submitted by third-party brokers. These peaks in demand were challenging for their colleagues to process within service level agreements.

Underwriting Associates had to transfer application details to the Society’s main back-office system and download large amounts of supporting documentation provided by the homebuyer or broker. It could take up to 20 minutes to complete just one application and hundreds were submitted.

Solution

A Blue Prism digital worker was brought in to assist the lending operations staff, a first for the Society. It proactively checks and downloads the new applications, extracts all key data and reads each line of the form. Next, it runs a series of checks to confirm the broker and homebuyer status and the purchase price.

If any information hasn’t transferred or wasn’t provided—like a homebuyer’s address—the digital worker fills in the gaps. Once the information is complete, the digital worker either assigns the application to another digital worker or notifies the case worker.

Colleagues are no longer required to download applications and supporting documentations, which saves a considerable amount of time. The process, which used to take up to 20-30 minutes, is now completed solely by intelligent automation. Brokers, mortgage advisors and homebuyers can get accurate and efficient updates regarding the status of their application. The digital worker processes an average of 267 applications a month and returns 90 hours per month to the business.