Customer Success

Challenge

Established in 1949 with a focus on commercial banking, Banco de Comercio had grown to the 4th largest bank in El Salvador by 2004. Operations now cover residential banking, mortgage and consumer lending, securities brokerage, credit card administration, factoring, and remittances.

As with most companies that experience significant growth, Banco de Comercio found its lending processes swimming in paper. The manual, paper-based operations siphoned away valuable time and resources that the bank wanted to funnel into growth measures. Further, Banco de Comercio wanted to reduce waste in order to position itself as the most operationally sound and customer-oriented provider of consumer lending services in the El Salvador market.

The bank turned to IDS de Centroamérica, an IT Solutions Integration company. Founded in Guatemala in 1982, IDS is well known in Central America for its technology and outsourcing solutions for banks, manufacturers, and telecommunication companies. By 2004, IDS had already worked with business process management (BPM) solutions to streamline credit card processing and fraud detection at many other Latin American financial institutions.

After conducting due diligence on the Banco de Comercio lending processes, IDS recommended BizFlow from HandySoft for streamlining and automating their lending processes.

Value: Streamlining Lending Processes

IDS’ first step was to document and model the lending process. IDS used BizFlow for both. IDS also used BizFlow to create the forms and business rules driving subsequent workflow and subsequent automation.

Explains Fernando Martin del Campo, IDS Commercial Director, “Loan officers at Banco de Comercio use a homegrown application to negotiate with the customer and perform the credit scoring. Upon deciding to grant the loan, each loan officer kicks-off a work item in BizFlow to manage loan administration – all the documents, approvals, signatures, and data inputs to get money into a customer’s hands. Based on loan type, BizFlow brings together the pertinent contractual clauses. BizFlow helps each loan officer to ensure that all data is correct and forms completed, then routes the contract package to legal. Once legal has approved, BizFlow ensures the contract is printed and submitted to the customer for signature. Then back in BizFlow, banking administrators authorize deposits into the core banking solution, an IDS product, where customers can access their money. If the loan was issued to consolidate several loans the customer already has with the bank, BizFlow interacts with the core banking solution in order to ensure the balances on all consolidated loans are set to zero. BizFlow handles the most critical lending processes and helps more than 100 users inside the bank perform according to standards and best practices, allowing the bank lending volumes to grow without having to hire more people.”

During the project implementation, IDS worked with Banco de Comercio to organize a BPM team and center of excellence. This team stayed involved through the entire implementation process, enabling transfer of process knowledge and technology training.