Loan Custody (that's what happens to your loan documents after you buy a house) is not a business that the public associates with banking. However, for majors banks it is a profitable operation. For some of them it is a very profitable proposition. The problem with Deutsche Bank was that it had several million documents sitting on the shelves. Customers (usually mortgage or escrow brokers) would call or fax the request (for either a copy, withdrawal, execution, ...) for a particular set of loans, one of the employees would enter the data into a web application and submit a request to process the loan documents.
One of the problems with this scenarios is that the employees spent half the day reading faxes and entering the data into the existing web applications, instead of fulfilling customer's request. In addition, efforts to open up the existing application to the internet failed because of the way the application was written. Number one, it was ASP session based. This meant that if more than several people were logged into the web site, it would become unbearably slow. And because the entire application based on the Session technology, it would not be possible to update it to the current methods without a significant rewrite. So a decision was made to rewrite it.
The rewrite was done using the AspLess methodology which guarantees ease of maintanance and debugging, which in turn yields fast development time, less bugs and better performance. Key employees were interviewed about their work flow, in an attempt to match the application with their workflow. The idea was to have the customers enter requests for documents as much as possible via the internet to free up the employees to do useful work. There was a benefit to the customers as well. No longer would they have to generate faxes, make phone calls (and be on hold), then call again to see whether the request was fulfilled. They would simply log on to the web site and track their request, like people can track UPS or FedEx packages. In addition, a series of reports was created to better gauge system response time, to monitor and mine data. This was also the first application, where I've implemented data-entry-friendly features of Mozilla Firebird browser, such as type-ahead lookup. So, those employees using this browser are able to speed through the data entry part much faster than others.
eRequest has managed to speed up loan processing by identifying bottlenecks in the previous system, by using data entry features and by paying close attention to detail. As a result, Loan Custody is a very profitable business for Deutsche Bank.
- Language: Visual Basic 6
- Reports: Crystal Reports 8
- Data Access: ADO 2.5
- RDBMS: Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.0
