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Home > Case study > How Quinnox Helped a Leading Bank Build a User-Friendly Application to Streamline Loan Application, Evaluation and Processing

How Quinnox Helped a Leading Bank Build a User-Friendly Application to Streamline Loan Application, Evaluation and Processing

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About the client:

The client is a leading specialist bank in the UK, providing a range of financial services including business finance, residential and commercial mortgages, savings products, and personal loans to meet the financial needs of businesses and individuals.

Customer Challenges

  • The client was using legacy applications which are decade old systems for their Digital products
  • Underwriting process took more time in Legacy Applications
  • User experience and design was not that great compared with their competitors

In the sphere of Commercial Property, a project was launched to address gaps in the underwriting process for loan applications. The business’s supporting applications were dispersed over several platforms, including origination services, in-life apps, origination apps, and origination portals. However, the existing underwriting process was manual and error-prone, hindering the efficiency of loan applications. Recognizing the need for change, the bank embarked on a transformative journey with the support of Quinnox. 

Of course, the project faced its fair share of challenges: 

  • One significant challenge was the infrastructure setup for development, which required careful planning and execution. The team managed to overcome this challenge and established a suitable infrastructure environment.
  • Another challenge was the interaction between multiple stakeholders and teams involved in the project. To facilitate effective coordination and resolution of issues, the team prioritized frequent conversations and maintained open lines of communication.
  • Additionally, the team actively sought feedback from the business and end-users, ensuring the project aligned with their expectations and requirements. The team could deliver the project as intended by incorporating frequent feedback loops. 

The Quinnox Approach and Solution:

Quinnox, renowned for its agile and innovative approach, understood the complexities of the bank’s underwriting process. They devised a ground-breaking solution, primarily focusing on addressing the existing systems’ gaps and empowering underwriters to process loan applications more efficiently. 

The project aimed to address gaps in the bank’s Commercial Property platform, mainly focusing on the underwriting process for loan applications. Quinnox wanted to help the bank build a Colleague Hub, a robust and user-friendly application that would streamline loan application evaluation and processing to help enhance the customer experience by reducing flight times, improving communication with brokers, and enabling quicker processing of loan applications.  

The Hub introduced additional capabilities, including integration with Azure services, new technology layers like a case management & business process management solution, a central repository for property and customer information, workflow systems and portals, a decision engine, and API integration with the Cross-Business Exposure (CBE) platform. 

Technical Competencies: The development team leveraged the latest front-end technology, to create user-friendly applications. Automation played a significant role in improving efficiency. The testing team automated the loan application creation process, resulting in scheduled daily jobs for standard regression scripts and easy maintenance of automation scripts through reusable components. 

The project team adopted an agile methodology, ensuring effective collaboration and communication among team members and stakeholders. New team members received hands-on training and were encouraged to participate in daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning, and retrospective sessions. On-the-job training and shadowing were provided to new joiners, allowing them to learn from experienced resources. The emphasis on training and upskilling ensured the team’s competence and enabled successful project delivery. 

Business Benefits:

The project successfully addressed gaps in the loan origination process, improved underwriting efficiency, and enhanced the overall customer experience. The application, along with its integrations and automation, positioned the client as a leader in delivering exceptional customer experiences in commercial property lending. The minimum viable features introduced in this phase added value to the loan origination processes, enabling underwriters to take a loan application from Indicative Mortgage Offer to Full Mortgage Offer.

Improved application security and performance with the implementation of API Management

Problem Statement:

Security issues were identified during the Penetration test performed when the product was newly launched in the market.  

This resulted in a delay in getting VAPT certified due to the security issues. 

Solution:

Quinnox team implemented Microservices and automated gateway using APIs and DevOps to ensure data security and compliance. 

Benefits:

  • Improved application submission performance from 1 minute to 20 seconds.
  • Reduced the cost of the third-party API consumption by caching the API response.
  • All Websites and APIs got Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT) Certified

Enhanced Broker experience

Problem Statement:

Systems were very slow and used legacy forms-based applications for their mortgage applications and some of the software and tools were ending lifetime support 

Customers/Brokers needed to fill applications manually, only 30% of the data was collected through existing applications and rest of the data was needed to be processed manually 

The case conditions document uploading, and approval process was carried out on a legacy system leading to delays in approval.

Solution:

  • Creating a rich and enhanced application for Broker experience.
  • Increasing the broker experience with auto populate and showing the whole case summary and conditions under a single page application.
  • Document upload and download for the case conditions in a single page.
  • Real time notifications to speed up the process for broker.
  • The new case tracker Helps the broker know the exact case status and the broker also gets notified when the case status is changed/ progressed

Benefits:

  • Got very positive feedback from brokers regarding the richness of the application and ease of use, which was a clear differentiation between competitors and our client. 
  • Brokers can get case status, details and document status instantly through email and real time notifications.
  • Instant approvals and reducing application turnaround times through several levers of automated underwriting
  • Proper implementation of DevOps and delivery automation by following Agile principles of continuous improvements
  • Onboarding of test automation using Qyrus helped to reduce QA timelines and frequent releases

Overall Benefits at Bank Lending Portfolio level

  • Loan book growth by mid double-digit percentage
  • Continued to drive operational efficiencies, with a significant reduction in underlying cost to income ratio 

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