In my last blog post, I covered how Intelligent Automation can help your organization become more agile and cost-efficient. In this post, I’ll get into three aspects at the heart of maximizing Intelligent Automation investments.
When it comes to automation, mortgage leaders often obsess about reducing labor costs by focusing on highly structured processes across the mortgage lifecycle. While this approach delivers some value, it relies on the human workforce to handle pockets of unstructured processes, hindering straight-through-processing and increasing cycle time. Intelligent Automation combines Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), enabling end-to-end automation of both structured and unstructured processes and leading to even greater value. It offers wide-ranging benefits, both quantitative and qualitative – from reducing operating costs and increasing agility to elevating customer experience and driving innovation.
Optimizing Intelligent Automation
Empowering your knowledge workers with digital bots, AI/ML and advanced analytics, frees them up to focus on high value tasks, propelling higher customer satisfaction and growth. Although there are several considerations for optimizing your Intelligent Automation investment, here are three critical factors that are fundamental to success:
1. Identifying high-impact business outcomes across the mortgage lifecycle: The first step is to use a data-driven approach to pinpoint high-impact business outcomes that Intelligent Automation can deliver across the mortgage value chain – from origination and underwriting to servicing and default. Here’s how.
- Combine deep domain knowledge of operations with industry best practices to find best-fit processes to automate.
- Determine and prioritize value creating levers by assessing process pain points, challenges and redundancies, and evaluating compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Map operational metrics to the identified value levers by assessing process feasibility and performing process gap analysis.
- Baseline operational metrics and estimate value realization across outcomes such as cost savings, cycle time reduction, process efficiency improvement and superior service availability.
2. Deploying the right mix of tools, platforms and technologies: Next, determine the optimal combination of tools, technologies, platforms and accelerators. Evaluate and deploy tools and platforms that can be combined synergistically across areas such as:
- Process and task mining.
- Attended and unattended automation.
- Workflow automation and business rules orchestration.
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)/ML for decision management and data classification and extraction.
- Advanced analytics and reporting.
- Front office automation.
3. Orchestrating integration across systems: Powering a connected enterprise requires seamless integration of systems of engagement at the front-end and systems of record at the backend. Leveraging out-of-the-box connectors, pre-built adapters, UI integrators and experience management solutions can help simplify the integration process and drive enterprise-wide digital transformation for high-impact results.
Driving real ROI on Intelligent Automation
Once you are convinced of the value that Intelligent Automation can bring, it may be tempting to plunge headlong into meetings to identify automation opportunities. Maximizing ROI on requires a deep understanding of not only technologies, tools and platforms but also the mortgage domain. In the last post of the series, I’ll dive into what you should look for in an Intelligent Automation partner to accelerate time-to-value on your investments.
To learn more about how Sourcepoint can help you make the most of your Intelligent Automation investments,
Author
Steven Schachter
Steven Schachter is Executive Vice President, Market Leader at Sourcepoint. He is tasked with leading the organization of 7,000+ employees and strengthening its brand in the market. Steven has a storied mortgage career, having been partner, COO and CFO of a national title agency and part of leadership teams for two successful start-ups. Steven can be reached at steven.schachter@sourcepointmortgage.com
