Patria Bank corporate customers in the agricultural sector now have faster access to financing solutions, following a project to automate data collection and processing workflows, carried out together with R Systems, a global leader in technology services and digital transformation.
In addition to the information provided by the applicant, the preparation and approval of a company’s credit file involve the bank accessing specific information from external sources (e.g., National Trade Register Office, National Agency for Fiscal Administration, Credit Risk Center). Until recently, only human operators could perform the data interrogation and collection from various sources.
On the one hand, this meant that the time allocated to these operations, prior to digitalization, led to a longer time frame during which the bank could provide a response to the credit applicant. On the one hand, this meant that the time allocated to these operations, prior to digitalization, led to a longer time frame before Patria Bank could provide a response to the credit applicant. On the other hand, in terms of internal flows for initiating and maintaining business relations with corporate customers, and in the case of certain standardized lending processes dedicated specifically to agricultural legal entities, Patria Bank employees had to perform time-consuming and demotivating steps due to their repetitive nature.
Due to the solution implemented by R Systems, all stages dedicated to querying, processing, and interpreting the information extracted within the query flow have been automated. The process of interrogating data from external sources is aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, thus reducing the need for human intervention; so human effort is only allocated to verifying exceptional situations (lack of documents, inconsistency of some data) and validating the received information while reducing operational risk.
The collaboration between Patria Bank and R Systems Europe was carried out in stages. The first step involved identifying standardized and repetitive workflow elements with corporate clients that could be performed without initial human intervention, particularly those related to interrogating external databases, retrieving, processing, and storing extracted information. Afterwards, the bank‘s specialists from various departments (Commercial, Operations, Corporate Credit Risk Assessment, and IT) and R Systems experts determined how to automate the process, finalized the technical specifications of the automation requests, and tested the integration of new processes into existing ones.
“The digitalization of the services offered by Patria Bank has been an assumed objective in recent years, and the Patria de Oriunde platform has enabled us to achieve excellent results for individual customers, who have gained easy access to 100% online services. Now it is time for our corporate clients to reap the benefits of simpler lending processes with dramatically reduced response times. In addition to enhancing public-facing processes, we have also optimized internal workflows, allowing our colleagues to focus on advising clients and identifying the best credit options. We are grateful for the availability of R Systems experts in coming up with optimal automation solutions that enable us to offer financial services aligned with what is required in this era of rapid digital transformation across all sectors.” said Valentin Vancea, Deputy General Manager, Operations and IT Division, Patria Bank.
“The Intelligent Business Automation solution we proposed to our partner, Patria Bank, manages to accurately collect and process data from different sources, generating a risk profile of the client with no errors. Human intervention is minimal only in the final validation phase. The process of determining a client’s eligibility for a particular credit product is done faster, resulting in a reduction in time and costs that will be reflected in the bank’s performance. We were pleased to find receptivity towards our proposals and the desire to scale up the implemented solutions, as well as to detect more processes that could be subject to automation. I am confident that Patria Bank has taken a huge step towards becoming what is known as a ‘neo bank’, capable of serving large numbers of clients from various industries and locations by providing them with quicker services.” added Cosmin Tudor, Business Unit Director for Digital Practice, R Systems Europe.
Original press release in Romania here.