Enforcing Compliance with Document Automation and Low-Code BPM

Imagine this. You’re one of the world’s largest banks having thousands of branch offices scattered around the globe, and you’ve got a huge problem. Individual loan officers (thousands of them) are making ad hoc edits to loan agreements totaling billions of dollars. In some cases, the edits are designed to make customers happy. In other instances, the edits are based on collusion between your own employees and supposed customers for the purpose of bilking the bank. Regardless of the reason, your inability to enforce compliance with your own rules and regulations, let alone external laws, is costing you big.

What you need isn’t as simple as garden-variety document automation, although, that would certainly be a good start. What makes more sense, though, is an integrated point solution designed to automate the entire loan origination process. Such a solution could begin with a care representative running through a comprehensive data-gathering interview with a new customer, inputting all information necessary for the loan. Then, and this is key, the interview data would be submitted to a loan approval committee and locked down so the customer care rep couldn’t change it after the fact. Just this much of a system could save you lots of trouble and money. But there’s lots more that could be done.

Suppose that you could build business logic into the data-gathering interview, so that when the loan committee finally got a look at it, each answer to each question would be color coded—green for a fully compliant answer, yellow for a questionable answer, and red for an answer that did not comply with your bank’s policies. Your loan committee could tell with a glance whether a prospective customer was a safe bet.

Now suppose that the committee approves the loan. The customer care rep again has access to the interview for the purpose of inputting any remaining information, but the original answers—the ones that actually convinced the loan committee to take the risk—are still locked down. With the interview complete, the customer care rep can generate all collateral documentation in a matter of seconds, automatically profiling a final version into, say,NetDocuments, or possibly an ECM, such as Alfresco or Hyland.

By combining a powerful document automation platform (HotDocs Cloud Services is probably your only real choice, here) with a Business Process Management system (BPMs) and a few other best-of-breed SOA-based technologies, you could solve a massive problem.

Ten years ago, building such a system would, itself, represent a pretty big challenge. Today, though, with the new breed of low-code BPMs (think AgilePoint, K2, Nintex, Micropact) that allow you to wrap other best-of-breed componentry up in point solutions that handles workflow, rights management, and data routing, you could have such a system up and running in a fraction of the time it would have once taken.