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The CEO of artificial intelligence consulting firm Simplyai, Anthony Scott, has said AI and automation in banking could make brokers twice as productive, and also lead to greater mortgage market competition.
Simplyai is an automation and artificial intelligence consulting services business with five regional bank clients that has recently been acquired by mid-market investment group Liverpool Partners.
Scott (pictured above) said the development and roll-out of AI within banking would speed up the processing of mortgages, which could allow some brokers to double the number of applications they submitted.
“One banking customer we have worked with was able to automate their mortgage loan origination process down from 23 days to under seven minutes,” Scott said.
This included cutting out waiting times for bank staff to review submitted application documents, via the automated identification and notification of “missing” pieces of customer information.
End-to-end automated process that include assessing applications against loan criteria, decisioning and issuing pre-approvals can result in 85% of loans “going straight through”, Scott said.
Staff within the banks can then be redirected towards problem solving the remaining applications.
“What we are automating is those straight through, high volume, low value processes – they just go through, you get a quick answer, and that then frees up staff to problem solve the rest,” Scott said.
For brokers, Scott said this would result in a fast response if there was missing information, so brokers would not need to wait out the banks’ broker service level agreement periods again and again.
It could also make brokers much more productive when it comes to their submitted loan volumes.
“There is a greater opportunity for brokers to bring more work on without the overheads. They will be able to process a higher volume of loans because a lot will be automated,” Scott said.
This could see a one- or two-person broker businesses managing 10 to 20 applications a week, doubling their output without having to increase their footprint, making their business more viable.
Scott said brokers should be encouraging the banks that they deal with to adopt AI and automation due to the faster turnarounds available for customers and advantages for their businesses.
“This type of automation improves the customer experience, as well as the staff experience. Brokers should be putting pressure on the institutions they deal with for faster turnarounds.”
Another aspect of Simplyai’s work includes working data to ensure it is structured correctly, such as looking up a post code to ensure it matches a suburb, or ensuring a street name is correct.
“Improving the data integrity is improving the whole experience,” Scott said. “The key to this is that you want a human being to maintain and own those key moments with the customer, and you want to get rid of the low value processing type of work. You want to be able to concentrate on delighting and adding value to that customer.”
Simplyai said AI and automation could drive greater competition in the Australian banking industry and mortgage market by making smaller regional banks more competitive.
The firm said that regional banks in the past had largely been unable to compete with the majors on data analysis, and as a result, credit worthiness and risk management.
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