Irish Mortgage Lender Keeps Up with Booming Economy

Over the past few years, the Republic of Ireland's economy has been growing so rapidly that many have dubbed it the 'Celtic Tiger'. One of the expanding sectors of the booming Irish economy has been the property market, with construction and demand for property at an all-time high.

This demand created a problem for Ireland's largest mortgage lender, Irish Permanent Plc. The number of mortgage applications they had to handle was rising to a level where it was becoming difficult to process them on a timely basis.

Streamlining the Business Process

The manual mortgage application process was a bottleneck. Passing paper files from desk to desk was pushing the average time taken to process an application to 14 to 16 days. Irish Permanent wanted to reduce this to provide a faster service to potential customers. A related problem was the sheer amount of paper being generated.

"The company either had to invest in more office space which is very costly in the center of Dublin or move the paper to off-site storage. However, this would have meant fitting out a building with water and fire protection which would also have proved expensive," said Peter Bolger, Technical Specialist at Irish Permanent.

Another problem with storing files off site was that retrieval would be difficult and they needed to be referenced frequently.

Faced with both a growing workload and mountain of paper, Irish Permanent went in search of a solution and turned to Aspect Software International -- a software company specializing in work management solutions -- to help develop an automated mortgage processing system.

The Solution

Aspect recommended an imaging and workflow system which would serve 175 users at Irish Permanent. One of the most important components of this system would be the capture application which would turn paper documents into electronic files, index them and deliver them to the workflow application. If handled incorrectly, this could become an expensive and laborious process.

The document capture product chosen was Ascent Capture from Kofax. "Kofax Ascent Capture was chosen primarily for its superior batch handling capabilities and recognition technologies" said Gerard Newman, Technical Director at Aspect Software International.

Using two Ascent Capture scanning stations together with Kofax hardware controllers and Bell Howell 6338 scanners, 4,000 pages per day are scanned, indexed and released into Eastman workflow software.

Ascent Capture is used to create batches of documents which are then automatically indexed using bar codes. The barcodes are recognized and read by the Kofax accelerator boards during scanning, thereby removing the need to carry out this process as an extra stage on another PC. About 80% of the indexing is automated, saving significant time and costs over manual indexing.

Ascent Capture's image processing functions are also used to produce clear, clean images. This increases the accuracy of automatic recognition engines such as OCR and ICR, and also reduces file sizes.

Ascent Capture's flexible release module provides a secure and seamless integration with Eastman workflow and is an integral part of the process of transforming the paper based information into electronic data.

The Benefits

The benefits that Irish Permanent have derived from using Ascent Capture to transform a paper-based manual business process into a streamlined electronic one are numerous and include:

·                                 Greater productivity. The company now can processes 50% more mortgage applications than it did when this was performed manually.

·                                 Increased efficiency. The time taken to process an application has dropped from around two weeks to a mere two days. The system also gives users much better access to mortgage files.

·                                 Cost reduction. This has been achieved by a reduction in the space needed for filing (images are stored on optical jukeboxes) and a reduction in labor costs. The company has also not had to take on additional office space to store paper!

The Biggest Benefit: More Business

Probably the most important benefit to come from this imaging project is that it has allowed Irish Permanent to win new business. New technology in Irish Permanent's branches has made it much more responsive to requests for quotations. This in turn has increased the application volumes considerably.

These increased volumes could never have been handled prior to the introduction of the new system at the head office. In this way, the reduction in time taken to process a mortgage application has become a real competitive advantage.

The last word should probably go to Peter Bolger at Irish Permanent. When asked to list the benefits of Ascent Capture, one of his answers was simply "Peace of mind!"