Another Success Story

Financial Services Provider

Industry:

Financial Services

In just a short period of time, Agile was able to identify process improvements and create a plan that will reduce operational costs and leverage our system to maximize future growth. Quote-right

Agile Client

Insights From Agile

Financial Services Provider Transforms Operations for Business Growth and Sustainability

Agile’s client provides products and services to financial institutions nationwide. For decades, the company has helped lenders protect against collateral losses on a variety of assets, including real estate, conventional and recreational vehicles, watercraft and mobile homes. The company also offers a wide range of solutions to support its customers’ checking, savings, commercial and home warranty offerings.

Client

Challenge

Agile’s client was losing business and facing a declining account portfolio, due in part to its client fee structure, known as cost-per-loan (CPL). The company’s CPL was higher than the industry average, and this aggressive fee was driving away business from existing and potential accounts.

Furthermore, the company’s operational environment was not scalable. Manual workarounds and an outdated core operational system limited the company’s ability to effectively service existing accounts and expand its clients’ footprint. To compound matters, the mainframe-like core system did not support many of the business processes and services. This system caused poor morale and high employee attrition.

To ensure the long-term viability of the organization, and to plan for growth, the company engaged Agile to optimize operational processes and productivity, reduce operational costs and overhead, and enable scalability. The goals were to reduce CPL, accelerate account growth, increase market penetration, and enhance operational throughput to enable capacity for growth. Agile’s objective was to create a strategic framework and actionable roadmap that would allow operations to run more efficiently while creating a scalable and repeatable infrastructure. This infrastructure would support the sales pipeline and allow the client to focus on closing larger deals that would grow the business.

The Agile Solution

Agile’s eight-week approach blended onsite interviews, observations, and discussion with offsite analysis. The process occurred in three major phases:

Information Gathering

Current process documentation
Observe, interview, benchmark
Map and analyze current state process, metrics and cost of status quo known issues, pain points, and workarounds

Analysis and Assessment

Determine root causes
Identify target improvement areas
Map applications to business process
Align operational improvements with IT strategy

Recommendation

Prioritize business process improvements
Design future process maps and anticipated productivity gains
Quantify annualized cost/benefit for each improvement
Create BPR Blueprint with implementation timeline and ROI
Create Implementation Playbook for repeatability of customer integrations

Results

Reduced Operational Costs

Agile identified short and immediate term areas of opportunity to reduce operational costs and increase throughput. First, Agile reduced operations workload by 40 hours/week through improvements to the operational system that automated manual workarounds. In addition, Agile identified processes that could be outsourced to an existing vendor, reducing 20 hours of operations time per week. This created a more streamlined, focused operational area.

Improved Business Processes and Productivity

Agile created a plan to enable the client to continue leveraging the investment in the core operational system while (a) creating a user-friendly interface to improve usability, (b) add additional functionality to support business processes and services, and (c) expand the system features to allow account self-service as another vehicle to reduce operational overhead. “The systems changes recommended by Agile has improved employee morale, decreased attrition, and improved productivity,“ states the client. “Moreover, customers now have real-time access to their records, which gives our company real product differentiation in the market.”

Reduced Implementation Cycle Times by 20% and Improved Customer Satisfaction

Agile’s Implementation Playbook defines and documents a repeatable process for account implementations. The Playbook is expected to reduce implementation cycle times by 20%, improve customer satisfaction and elevate employee morale and effectiveness.

Business scalability and sustainability, once limited by process inefficiencies, are now possible. The client explains, “Our company is now free to spend more time and budget innovating for the future versus maintaining processes of the past.”