A UK bank has an impressively long history, and throughout they have looked for ways to innovate and improve their business. When COVID-19 struck, they found themselves well positioned to help customers in need of mortgage relief. How? With a Blue Prism intelligent automation.

Challenge

The lockdown and shelter-in-place mandates that were issued early in the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread unemployment and financial worries. Homeowners with mortgages were left wondering if they could pay the bills next month. The British government recognized the stress and developed a program to help its citizens.

Mortgage customers were offered the opportunity of a three-month payment holiday. The bank aimed to respond to its customers quickly but knew that phone lines would be busy and request queues would be long. It estimated that many thousands of customers would request a repayment holiday.

Solution

The bank had an important tool at its disposal. A Blue Prism digital workforce was already hard at work in the mortgage area of the business. Business owners were able to quickly and easily reuse code from other mortgage processes to create a new process for approving payment holidays. Incredibly the team had the process up and running in just two days.

The bank developed an online form for the customers to complete. A digital worker picked up the form from a mailbox, checked the details provided by the customer, and performed validation checks. If the customer met the requirements, the digital worker would apply the mortgage payment holiday and send an SMS advising the customer. In the end, digital workers had processed 500,000 requests.