Retail Lending Automation For The Large Bank in Azerbaijan: 6x Productivity Boosted

About the Customer

Azerbaijan Retail Bank is part of the large financial group, which has branches in more than 20 countries worldwide. The Bank operates in various regions all over the globe: from Europe and the CIS to Africa and Asia.

The Bank offers a wide range of financial products and services for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and individuals.

Project Goals

Improve the efficiency of business processes. Our client had 300 employees working in its representative office at the time. With the growth of the business, the Bank experienced growth-related challenges: increased number of loan applications, phone calls, and customer visits to the offices. This made reviewing loan applications and issuing loans slow for the Bank’s clients and labor-intensive for its employees.

At the end of 2019, the Bank set the goal of automating the lending process and launching a loan origination system that meets international quality and performance standards.

Introduce innovative types of banking services. The Bank intended to offer the Azerbaijan market modern and analytics-driven banking services: instant loan decisions, novel standards of speed and loan disbursement, as well as multi-channel customer service, including chatbots.

Platform Selection

Azerbaijan Retail Bank, with the support of the Head Office, organized a competitive tender among several platforms. The ABLE Origination system won the intense and complex selection process.

The Bank held ABLE Origination in high regard because the solution uses open source software and fully complies with the technical requirements of the Bank.

Azerbaijan Bank appreciated the deep expertise of our company in the field of lending and decision-making processes, the flexibility and complexity of the proposed solutions, the high quality of development and internal testing.

Implementation Phases

The implementation of ABLE Origination included three stages.

Stage 1. Automatic loan pre-approval

At this stage, our team automated the collection of loan applications, including remote sales channels and receiving credit bureaus reports.

After filling in the minimum number of fields in the application form, the applicant instantly gets an initial decision on their application, as well as other additional proposals.

As a result, the efficiency of the Bank’s employees has more than doubled.

Stage 2. Making the final decision on the application

The second stage of the project meant integrating the system with the core banking system to receive client details and their credit history with the bank. Also, our team automated the verification and underwriting processes and ensured scorecard deployment.

As a result, the bank could provide every client with several personalized offers.

The second stage made it possible to further increase the productivity of the Bank’s employees by 4.5 times.

Stage 3. Preparation of loan documentation and loan disbursement

The third stage was aimed at expanding the integration with the core banking system in terms of setting up a bank account and concluding an agreement, as well as the automatic formation of credit documentation.

According to the results of the operation stage, employee productivity, in general, has increased by 6 times over, compared to manually processing the loan applications.