Financial services

Case Study:

Automated workflow at Nedbank

25 April 2008

South Africa’s Nedbank Personal Loans achieved automated workflow and a paperless environment with .NET and K2.

Nedbank, one of the four biggest commercial banks in South Africa, is currently growing three times faster than its nearest competitor in the micro and personal loans business. To cope with this increase Nedbank turned to Microsoft Gold Partner Intervate to automate its business process.

Previously, Nedbank Personal Loans was dependent on a manual, paper-based tracking system that was time-consuming and unproductive. The process involved various stages of printing, signing and faxing, which could take up to a week with a ‘clean’ application and even longer if queries arose.

In 2004, the bank decided that it needed an automated business process and workflow solution with a document image viewer to improve turnaround time for customers and meet growing demand.

Andrew Souchon, head of IT at Nedbank Personal Loans, says: “We made the decision not to undertake a radical reengineering of the existing process. We wanted to ensure that the process was familiar to our users. Our primary requirements were that the system automate workflow, ensure adequate measurement, tracking and escalation, and give us a paperless environment.”

Working in partnership with Intervate, Nedbank developed an automated solution to streamline the processing of loan applications. Intervate undertook a full needs analysis before designing a workflow solution using the Microsoft .NET Framework development system and the K2.net 2003 workflow engine.

Initially deployed in February 2005, the Intervate solution automated the company’s personal loan processes by sending all faxes from branch offices to a fax server – an element of Windows 2003. The division is also using Microsoft Office 2003, which includes Microsoft Document Imaging, helping users to scan, view, and perform minor editing on images that are part of the loans processing system.

Benefits resulting from the implementation have proven diverse. Most importantly, loan approval time for customers with ‘clean’ applications has been cut from five days to less than a day, with some priority applications taking as little as six minutes. This significant improvement in performance ensures higher levels of customer satisfaction and is bringing huge benefits to South Africa’s financially underserved and low-income communities, where the need for micro finance is highest.

Sales throughput rose by 107 per cent in 2006, while resources have only increased by six per cent. In addition, managers now enjoy significantly increased visibility, with a 360-degree view of the division’s operations. This allows them to measure critical success factors far more accurately than before, helps with identifying new products and resources, and makes compliance with regulators easier.

This case study was published in the Winter 2007 issue of Finance on Windows magazine.