Innovating and transforming the core credit and lending process globally
Lendtech vendor spotlight: AFS
FinTech Futures has a look at Austria, UK and US based Automated Financial Systems (AFS®) and its credit and lending and risk management solutions for leading banking institutions. AFS is investing in and continues expanding globally.
The numbers don’t lie, or even sit still, for AFS. The firm has been around since 1970 and today works with leading banking institutions including two-thirds of the top 25 global and US banking groups.
Currently AFS software platforms process more than €2 trillion in CIB and SME loans (corporate, commercial, and speciality) nightly. Additionally, AFS software supports its banks in the fast growing syndicated lending market.
While AFS has a healthy history and is in a happy state – it wants to continue staying at the forefront of innovation, a topic at the “top of everyone’s mind these days, especially within the European marketplace”. But what does innovation mean in the credit process space?
Richard Bare, GM, AFS GmbH, says: “We’re in a real-time world and all banks need real-time solutions and answers to be competitive today, sustain that competitive advantage and react in real-time in order to provide the ultimate customer experience – at any step in the credit process.
“Our solutions react directly in all channels – digital, mobile, relationship manager, in person, on line or any other new channel or integration points that are here now and will come about in the near or distant future.
“As a long-standing strategic innovator, we know that the world of innovation never stands still and increasing customer expectations and further regulatory requirements mean AFS continues to make substantial investments in technology advances and functionality enhancements.”
This is where its comprehensive solution AFSVision® comes in – offering a real-time solution for any type of loan, a cradle-to-grave credit and loan management system spanning from loan application, underwriting, decisioning/sanctioning/funding through servicing, to provisioning and final workout, if and when needed – all with full workflow enablement integration and with one single version of the data.
To ensure absolute data integrity AFSVision uses straight-through processing (STP) – data is entered once and done. Banks gain enterprise-wide control of their lending businesses, have one single version of the truth and are ideally placed to respond to any regulatory enquiries such as fully reconciled IFRS9/Anacredit/CECL without the pain of complex data extraction or integration points. AFSVision is fully deployed and operational at multiple banks today.
In Bare’s opinion, banks need to have the ability to deploy the core lending solution using any distribution method – data centres, traditional outsourced models or “now more than ever”, the cloud. To underline the flexibility and speed of implementation delivered on the cloud, Robert Kahn, MD, global banking for AFS, advises: “Many of our clients achieved three times faster commercial loan growth with the AFS hosted private cloud than their peer banks by offering scalability, flexibility, ability to meet aggressive acquisition strategy. We process more on the AFS private cloud than the majority of individual global banks.”
To help its clients meet this demand, AFS utilises artificial intelligence (AI), robotics process automation (RPA) and machine learning (ML). Bare advises that many of its client’s business banking loan portfolios utilise complex robotic algorithms for auto approvals. These clients have saved half a billion keystrokes and mouse clicks from the business, increasing efficiency.
AFS also supports its clients’ RPA roadmaps through automation of manual processes around work processes and flows. One client says: “AFS was exceptionally supportive. I cannot say enough positive things. They knew it was a critical part of our roadmap and they absolutely went out of their way to make it a success.” AFS committed to making this happen by developing system guidelines and creating workflow prototypes.
Outstanding delivery credentials
While AFS works with all banks on credit transformation, Bare says: “Most are out-of-the-box implementations using our standard product with little or no customisations.” Allied to the company’s extensive experience in system migration and consolidation of old undocumented systems with inherent cyber-security risks, the end result is on time and on budget implementations with a fully secure and vastly improved customer experience with no disruptions to the banks’ business.
Kahn concludes: “For those banks where core lending innovation is a high priority within the strategic transformation agenda, AFS has to be considered as a preferred technology platform and implementation partner.”
This article is also featured in the September 2018 edition of the Banking Technology magazine.
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