Postbank Bulgaria Transforms Loan Administration with RPA

Postbank, legally named Eurobank Bulgaria AD, is one of the leaders of the banking market in Bulgaria, and the third biggest player on the loans and deposits sector.

Taking to heart that it operates into an ever-changing digital world, Postbank is a keen adopter of innovation and a proven trend-setter in all areas of its portfolio—credit and debit cards, mortgage and consumer loans, saving products, corporate products targeted to all range of businesses—from small ones to international corporations active on the Bulgarian market.

In fact, the bank's remarkable achievements in innovation have been publicly recognized in recent years, with many awards. Occupying a strategic position in retail and wholesale banking, Postbank has built one of the most developed branch networks and modern alternative banking channels in the country.

Postbank streamlines internal processes with automation

It’s the most natural decision for Postbank to look for and adopt new technologies for improving the working process. Facts proved the bank to be one of the bravest and open-minded institutions in this market regarding innovation.

As part of its long-term strategy of modernizing and improving products and services, Postbank selected Service Centrix as the implementation partner of the UiPath robotic process automation (RPA) software solutions. The bank embarked on this partnership following on its strategic objective—to streamline vital internal processes while continuing to provide the best services possible as efficiently as possible.

Service Centrix started with a proof of concept (PoC) automating one process that involved repetitive manual work. It not only demonstrated the suitability of the UiPath RPA platform, but also kickstarted the RPA journey of the bank as this automation was adopted immediately afterwards.

The automation journey benefits both customers and employees

What started as an initiative to improve customer services by way of optimized business processed proved to have a significant positive impact on employees’ morale and engagement.

Shortly after the PoC, the Postbank team identified 20 processes within the Loan Administration Division which were automated within six months.

Among these, one process was key for the bank’s business since its high volumes and zero-errors requirement used to put a lot of pressure on seven employees performing this task daily. The goal of the process was distributing received payments for credit cards debts to correct customers and their correct account, if they had multiple. Although seemingly simple, this task involved several checks in different systems and databases to make a rules-based decision. Automating this process took around 10 weeks and achieved highly satisfactory results. One UiPath software robot managed to finish processing the daily payments in 2½ on average, distributing successfully 95% of received payments with no errors and sending a list of the remaining 5% of payments for human employees to handle. These remaining 5% of payments required just up to two hours for two employees to solve, usually by contacting customers to collect additional information.

In comparison, before automation this task took around four hours per day for seven employees. The automation of this process saved two FTEs, allocated to other activities, reduced time for payment processing, and lowered the error rate to 0%.

Automating the remaining 19 processes eased and optimized the department’s work as they involved time-consuming repetitive back-office tasks: collecting customer information from public registries or websites and uploading it in customers’ profiles in the bank’s systems; uploading invoices data into systems; updating reports with data from various sources; changing status of certain deals in bank’s systems; processing fee payments in systems; performing data validations and sending notifications on discrepancies; creating documents from templates; attachment of documents into systems; collection of the data from government public services, etc.

Implementing the project took six months. Since then, the 20 processes are being executed by six UiPath software robots managed by a UiPath Orchestrator. Most processes start automatically upon a schedule tailored to business needs. Due to their specifics, a few processes get started manually by employees when needed.

Postbank predicts a 2:1 return on investment in two years

A key benefit of this RPA project was its fast implementation—20 business processes were fully automated within six months. In contrast, the automation of the same processes with the means of standard programming would have required major changes in key banking systems, which would have taken years of development for a much larger team with a much higher project risk.

These automations freed employees from repetitive, time-consuming mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on value-added work. These time and cost savings were estimated to a total of 10 FTEs, allowing for better allocation of capacity and undertaking more tasks by the team. It is expected that the automation project will bring a 2:1 return on investment (ROI) in two years.

RPA is a powerful tool for automation and optimization of processes, both back-end and front-end, and when used in a smart way, taking into consideration all factors and constrains, it can provide huge benefits to any financial organization.”

Belyan Belchev • Head of Loan Administration

The automation also provides unlimited process scalability. If business grows and hence the number of transactions increase, they can be easily handled by adding more robots to execute affected processes.

Finally, the automation project improved service delivery and compliance. Faster and error-free process execution is another benefit, both for the bank’s customers and its Loan Administration department.

The bank continues digital innovations, but remains human-centric

While the main objective of the bank is to become more digital, it wants to remain a human-centric company, where flexibility is fostered and individual potential is employed to the maximum. And that is one of the biggest achievements of the project—embracing a technology for the digitalization of the business that improves the work environment for employees, optimizes processes, and saves time needed for individuals to use their creative talent and add value to the business.