Shawbrook Bank has seen a fourfold reduction in the time it takes to process buy-to-let mortgage offers since rewriting legacy software using low code through a Pegasystems platform.
The time it takes for customers to move from an indicative buy-to-let mortgage offer to a full digital offer has reduced from 40 days to 11 days, according to the bank. Process automation technology from Pegasystems has increased underwriter productivity from an average of six mortgages per week to 20.
Shawbrook Bank, which serves small and medium-sized business customers, consumers and property investors, was the result of a merger of five different finance firms in 2011, and it has since grown rapidly. As a result, the company decided to rewrite its end-to-end processes in its loans and savings businesses. It is a 100% digital business, with no branches or current accounts.
Russ Thornton, chief technology officer (CTO) of Shawbrook, said the low-code platform supported the bank’s strategy to ensure its staff, who are skilled in a very complex and specialist part of financial services, have the tech they need to do things more efficiently.
“Our ‘best-of-both’ strategy combines our deep human expertise with best-in-class technology”
Russ Thornton, Shawbrook Bank
“Our ‘best-of-both’ strategy combines our deep human expertise with best-in-class technology,” he said. “This second phase of our Pega journey continues to drive even better customer experiences, as well as – and really importantly – our colleague experience, through automation and easy-to-use low-code user interfaces.”
In an interview with Computer Weekly in March, Thornton said: “Our strategy revolves around combining our deep human expertise with leading-edge tech and data. We retain the human element because we play in complicated markets, but we want specialists to have the right technology and data around them to make decisions quickly.”
Shawbrook has around 110 full-time IT staff and a further 70 through its IT suppliers, who are outsourced to the bank and are “part of the team”, according to Thornton.
Shawbrook worked with digital transformation and services consultancy Labb Consulting to redesign the process for customers and staff and quickly implement it using Pega Platform.
“Labb has supported and upskilled the internal teams at Shawbrook in support of Shawbrook’s technology strategy, which is to own the customer experience with its technology and to partner with experts for everything else,” the bank said in a statement.
Next up for Shawbrook’s journey with Pegasystems’ platform is the digitisation of end-to-end customer journeys and internal savings processes to reduce the time it takes for new and existing customers to open an account and make their first deposit.
