The process of onboarding or offboarding in a mortgage lending company is a minefield. In an industry with strict data regulation, financial service providers are under the gun to get their staff in and out of the system as quickly as possible to keep workflow moving and data secure.
The major obstacle that slows down a change in employment is technology-based. For decades coordinating IT permissions controls with HR procedures has put a huge drag on the process. Luckily, technology is catching up. Let’s take a look at how robotic process automation (RPA) is benefiting the onboarding and offboarding process for mortgage lenders.
RPA Technology for Mortgage Lenders
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology recently applied to the mortgage and financial services industry. Up-and-coming in enterprise firms for the last decade, RPA technology is finally reaching the scale where it can be implemented by small and medium-sized businesses. RPA can be described as a collection of software bots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers that do automated work by being programmed or by “learning” how processes should function using empirical evidence gathered from system data. It’s a back-end development tool that standardizes HR and IT cooperation, among other things, in a powerful way.
How It Works
The automated bots in the RPA process drive onboarding and offboarding processes to be faster than ever. Identity is the key to securing any change in employment via RPA. Leveraging an identity provider and integration with an active directory (AD), this automation can authenticate new hires and nullify old accounts automatically. RPA eliminates human-triggered stop-gaps in processes like receiving email, saving documents, and updating database records. Business process workflows happen automatically and authorizations get prompt attention by notifying HR and IT without the need for internal communication. With permissions controls built into the RPA procedures, giving access to a new mortgage employee or booting somebody off the system when they leave becomes a one-step procedure. Access Business Technologies or ABT, a California-based mortgage software development firm, has taken the technology and integrated it as part of their product MortgageWorkSpace. The result is a cloud-based work environment that adapts quickly and specifically addresses the obstacles present in the financial services world.
Faster and More Efficient
The efficiency of RPA is unquestionable. Employees are busy. They overlook notifications. They don’t always prioritize perfectly. They simply have incomplete information to see the bigger picture so human-driven processes go slowly. With RPA, the system or the “bots” see the big picture that individual employees can’t. From human resources to IT, the RPA workflow handles a majority of the work and boosts any human intervention necessary to move forward. Everything happens in minutes instead of the old way, which took multiple hours of active work. With a system prepared to receive a new loan officer on their first day of work, there is no longer a time gap for new hires. They can get familiar with the work environment starting on day one.
Benefits Beyond Speed
Though timeliness is easily understood, there are further benefits of RPA that go beyond mere speed. Accuracy improves because machines handle the data entry and there is no room for human error. Exiting loan officers, who have a high turnover rate, are no longer a risk management threat. The system is secured and they simply can’t take sensitive data with them on the way out. Finally, it’s just one less thing for your busy employees to do. HR and IT staffers get to permanently remove steps in the process from their to-do lists.
The truth is that onboarding and offboarding are slow in the mortgage world because they are data-intensive processes. The sensitive financial information of clients and partners cannot be compromised so we have long suffered the labor intensity of doing it manually. In the name of efficiency there are multiple ways to speed up the process, but ultimately the answer is to go high-tech and consider a solution that has RPA working on your side.
Mortgage companies that implement new automation technology reap the benefits in employee speed, accuracy, and security. For more information visit MortgageWorkSpace, write to us at sales@myabt.net, or fill out this form.