Joining a commercial lending transformation initiative at the world’s largest bank in terms of commercial assets was an exercise in managing complexity on a massive scale. The bank had a clear strategic objective: modernize its extensive lending operations to improve efficiency, enhance customer experience, and strengthen risk management. They had selected a new, comprehensive Loan Origination System (LOS) as the core technology from one of the product suites of the organisation I worked with.
My role involved elements of both Lead Business Analysis, focusing on redesigning the underlying lending processes and ensuring the new LOS platform was implemented effectively to support those changes. It quickly became apparent that while the technology (Product) was a key enabler, the most significant hurdles lay in navigating the existing intricate workflows (Process) and fostering alignment and change across numerous departments and thousands of employees accustomed to established routines (People). My approach has always been that lasting solutions require addressing these foundational elements first.
Understanding the Core Challenges
The need for modernization was clear, but the obstacles were deeply rooted:
- People & Organizational Structure: The bank operated in functional silos. Lending officers, underwriters, operations teams, risk analysts, and compliance experts often had distinct priorities and limited visibility into the end-to-end process. This naturally created resistance to standardization and required significant effort to build consensus around new ways of working. Managing this scale of change required careful consideration of training and communication needs across diverse user groups.
- Process Inefficiencies: The existing loan origination process was highly manual, fragmented across multiple legacy systems, and lacked consistency across different regions or loan types. This resulted in significant operational friction: extended cycle times, reliance on paper documentation, duplicate data entry, and challenges in providing borrowers with transparency. Crucially, this fragmentation also impeded effective risk assessment and made compliance adherence cumbersome.
- Platform Implementation: The selected LOS platform offered robust capabilities, but deploying it effectively wasn’t simply about installation. The core challenge was to configure it to support a redesigned, optimized future-state process, rather than merely automating the existing inefficiencies. This required careful integration of disparate data sources and ensuring the platform delivered a genuinely improved user experience for both internal teams and borrowers.
My Strategy: A Foundational Approach
Believing that technology best serves well-defined processes executed by aligned people, my strategy focused on building from the ground up:
- Engaging the People: My initial focus was on stakeholder analysis and engagement. I facilitated numerous cross-functional workshops designed not just to gather requirements, but primarily to build a shared understanding of the current state pain points and foster consensus on the desired future state. Techniques like process walkthroughs and collaborative journey mapping helped break down silos and create a collective sense of ownership for the solution. Clear communication and managing expectations about the new platform’s capabilities and the impact of the changes were ongoing priorities.
- Redefining the Process: Before diving deep into platform configuration, we undertook detailed As-Is process mapping to identify specific bottlenecks, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement. Based on this analysis, I led the design of standardized To-Be workflows, focusing on streamlining handoffs, leveraging automation potential, and embedding compliance checks proactively. This involved creating clear process documentation and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success.
- Informing the Product (Platform): With a clear future-state process defined and key stakeholders aligned, we could then effectively translate these needs into detailed requirements and user stories for configuring the new LOS platform. I worked closely with the technical teams and the platform vendor to ensure the platform configuration accurately reflected the intended workflows and delivered the required functionality, including key features for a new digital borrower portal. We prioritized implementation iteratively, starting with core lending journeys.
Navigating Implementation Roadblocks
Large-scale projects inevitably encounter obstacles. Two examples stand out:
- Overcoming Resistance to Standardization: A significant business unit initially resisted adopting the standardized workflow, arguing their specific client base required unique handling. To address this, we first analyzed their performance data to objectively demonstrate the inefficiencies of their current process compared to the proposed standard (Process). Then, through targeted discussions, we showed how the new system could accommodate their essential requirements within the standard framework (People/Product). Finally, securing visible endorsement from senior leadership helped reinforce the strategic importance of standardization (People).
- Addressing a Platform Limitation: We identified a specific, low-volume lending scenario where full automation via the standard platform configuration would require disproportionately complex and potentially risky custom development (Product). Rather than pursue costly customization, we collaborated with technical experts and the vendor to devise a pragmatic solution. This involved utilizing standard configuration for most of the workflow, supplemented by a well-defined, minimal manual procedure for the edge case (Process/Product), thereby preserving the project timeline and budget while still capturing the vast majority of the benefits.
The Outcome: Measurable Improvement Rooted in Fundamentals
The transformation delivered significant results. The bank achieved measurable reductions in average loan turnaround times, realized substantial operational efficiencies, improved borrower satisfaction through the digital interface, and enhanced risk management capabilities due to improved data quality and automated controls.
These positive outcomes weren’t solely due to the new technology (Product). They were a direct result of the foundational work: achieving alignment among key stakeholders (People) and fundamentally redesigning and standardizing the core business processes (Process) upon which the technology was deployed.
Key Reflections
This complex engagement reinforced several core principles for managing large-scale transformations:
- Process Discipline is Paramount: Thoroughly analyzing, understanding, and optimizing business processes before implementing technology is crucial. Automating a flawed process simply yields a faster flawed process.
- Invest in Change Management: Technology implementation is often secondary to the challenge of guiding people through change. Consistent communication, stakeholder engagement, and addressing user concerns proactively are critical success factors.
- Pragmatism Drives Progress: While striving for the ideal solution is important, knowing when to adopt pragmatic compromises to maintain momentum and deliver core value is essential, especially when faced with technical or organizational constraints.
In essence, successfully transforming a complex operation like commercial lending requires looking beyond the technology itself. It demands a focus on optimizing the underlying processes and ensuring the people involved are informed, aligned, and equipped for the change. Get those elements right, and the technology can deliver truly impactful results.
