Global Banking, Mortgage, and Financial Services Company Cuts Portfolio Acquisition Costs by 75 Percent Using Centerprise

 

"Overall, the project met and surpassed all of its goals, including major productivity increases, considerably shorter lead time to integrate new business partners, and improved data quality.  What once took 20 people to accomplish now takes one person. The time for onboarding new partners has been cut from 3-4 weeks to less than one week."
Harley Hess, Financial Services

 

Overview

This customer is a multinational banking and financial services company. It is the second largest bank in the U.S. in deposits, home mortgage servicing, and debit cards. The servicing acquisition group is responsible for managing the entire workflow of the acquisition process, covering the steps from initial evaluation, bidding, and pricing to data cleansing, due diligence and transmission to servicing management applications.

 

Challenges

With large volumes of data entering the servicing acquisition workflow, the group faced many challenges. Data arrived in different file formats and structures from a multitude of business partners and when data files did not conform to the Wells Fargo system predefined layout, programming changes were needed to transform these data files, slowing down the process considerably. Frequently, data came from multiple sources throughout the process life cycle and needed to be consolidated and reconciled. Data transformation, done in Access databases, required significant development time to integrate new data formats. Long lead times in integrating new data resulted in long lead times in integrating new business partners. Large numbers of Access databases and programs were difficult to track and posed risks related to regulatory compliance and customer data privacy. Validation rules were scattered in many different systems making it difficult to consistently enforce these rules.

 

Business Needs

Based on the above challenges, Astera worked with the customer's business and technology management to develop key business needs for the solution:

• Empowering business users to manage the data transformation process without day–to–day involvement of IT resources
• Quickly integrating new business partners and achieving drastic reduction in time and effort in defining new maps
• Providing functionality to adapt to common file format anomalies such as extra fields, missing headers, out of sequence fields, etc.
• Eliminating the large number of Access databases, programs, and spreadsheets and centralizing all transformation and validation rules in a single repository
• Providing tools to quickly modify the transformation and validation rules to adjust to incoming data files and internal business policy changes
• Achieving major productivity gains for the servicing acquisition department

 

Astera Solution and Results

Overall, the project met and surpassed all of its goals, including major productivity increases, considerably shorter lead time to integrate new business partners, and improved data quality.  The project was completed on time and within budget, and met or exceeded all the stated project goals, including rapid integration of new business partners, major productivity increases for servicing acquisition group, centralized repository of transformation and validation rules, and elimination of Access databases and programs. What once took 20 people to accomplish now takes one person. The time for onboarding new partners has been cut from 3-4 weeks to less than one week.

Astera worked closely with the customer to design a solution using Centerprise Data Integrator to provide interactive data transformation and cleansing functionalities that the business group could use without day–to–day involvement of IT resources. The solution also used Centerprise Integration Framework APIs for integration with upstream systems, such as third–party servicing management applications.

Future phases will incorporate new versions of Centerprise Data Integrator to achieve a tighter integration with other systems, pushing data quality management to the front of the process where business partners can validate data before transferring it. Astera is working with the customer to explore leveraging Centerprise's data transformation, validation, and profiling capability to other business areas such as asset acquisition and data integration.

Data quality improvements were achieved using a combination of Centerprise data validation rules and profiling reports. Data profile XML was used to create deficiency workflow tasks for upstream systems that worked with business partners to correct any data issues. Additionally, the validation rules that were once dispersed in various databases were now combined and stored in Centerprise's centralized repository.

Finally, integration with upstream servicing management systems was accomplished using the Centerprise integration framework–a suite of APIs based on Microsoft .NET platform.

 

Why Astera

This customer chose Centerprise because of its unique combination of advanced features that solved all of its data transformation and partner integration issues combined with ease of use that enabled business users to manage the data transformation process without day–to–day involvement of IT resources.

Industry

Banking, Mortgage, Financial Services

 

Application

Streamline servicing acquisition workflow

 

Product

Centerprise Data Integrator

 

Key Facts

• Workflow related to acquiring servicing rights from originating lenders, aggregators, and other business partners
• Workflow includes bidding, pricing, conducting due diligence, and boarding loans to servicing management systems
• Data formats and layouts are unique to the individual business partner and must be converted to match the company's internal standards
• Needed interactive data transformation and cleansing functionality that business group could use without day–to–day involvement of IT resources
• Solution also used Centerprise integration framework APIs for integration with upstream systems, such as third–party servicing management applications