Aldergrove Financial Group is a community-based credit union in Frazier Valley, British Columbia that provides personal and business banking solutions to its 20,000 members. Formed in 1954 under the original name of Otter Farmers’ Institute Credit Union, Aldergrove has since merged with the Matsqui Credit Union and expanded to five branches.
Aldergrove is committed to providing personal, professional, and financial services to its members and community. One of its most common services is loan origination. The loan origination process begins when a borrower applies for a new loan and is completed when the funds have been distributed, with multiple steps in between. The failure or incompletion of any of these steps could mean a costly delay for customers.
Unreliable Scripting and Painful Processes
John D. Friesen, Information Technology Manager, and the IT department were in charge of ensuring the loan origination process completed in a timely and accurate manner. On a daily basis, data from an online application needed to be extracted from an https website and verified. This task was automated by an old, unreliable script, and whenever it stopped working the IT team was forced to finish the process manually. Automation is supposed to save time, but this scripted task was costing John and his team multiple hours per week of upkeep.
What Aldergrove needed was a reliable solution that could automate the complete process. Initially, they turned to writing new custom code to fix the problem. While some of these solutions were able to complete the task, they were still unreliable, time-consuming to maintain, and painful to set up.
Automate saves us time and enables us to solve problems efficiently and correctly.
John D. Friesen, Information Technology Manager, Aldergrove Financial Group
Building an RPA Digital Workforce for Loan Origination
John and his team needed a better solution. They downloaded Automate to evaluate its robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. When they were just five minutes into his free trial of the product, the team had already configured a software robot to run the loan origination task. While they had only intended to solve one problem with Automate, the team quickly realized that Automate robots had the flexibility to improve processes throughout the company. It was this agility and Automate’s easy deployment that helped John convince the VP of Operations, Tracy Yolland, that Automate was the perfect product for Aldergrove Financial.
To assure Tracy of Automate’s robustness and scalability, John automated one of her recurring tasks. Before discovering Automate, John would run a script each week that pulled a summarization of data from an internal MySQL database and send it to Tracy as an Excel file, where she would then manipulate the data across multiple sheets and, in some cases, add charts and formatting. With Automate RPA, John was able to include the data manipulation and formatting into the configuration of the Automate robot. This saved her time, and the data was ready to go and properly formatted when she arrived to work every Monday morning.
The Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
After John convinced his bosses that robotic process automation from Automate was the way to go, he was able to implement the solution quickly and easily. He estimates that Automate saves him and his team 2-3 hours of work each week. “Automate saves us time and enables us to solve problems efficiently and correctly,” John said.