- ThoughtWorks created a new loan origination system for a financial services client to handle a projected doubling in volume from the expansion into a new product line. - The new system integrated and automated the origination processes, empowered dealers with online access, improved configuration management, and reduced transaction turnaround times from days to just minutes or hours. - The client has realized significant benefits like lower costs, increased competitiveness, and the ability to easily integrate new services.

1. Empowering Dealers With A New Loan Origination System
When this financial services client projected its lease and loan origination volumes to
double due to expansion into a new product line, it turned to ThoughtWorks. Utilizing
cutting-edge technology, ThoughtWorks created an origination system equipped to process
the higher volumes, improve transaction turnaround time and deliver new features to the
dealer sales channel.
The Client The Benefits
The client is a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company that offers a diverse range of financing alternatives
for industrial customers and dealers throughout the world. It is a global organization with offices and • With the new system, the
cost-of-sale has vastly
subsidiaries throughout North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. The client creates
reduced and competitiveness
financing plans individually tailored to its customers’ businesses and helps position them to make the
increased. Dealers can now
most of future opportunities. input customer specifications
and generate a finance quote
The Situation in seconds, vastly improving
When the client’s parent company expanded its product line to include additional equipment, the customer service levels and the
financial services subsidiary forecast that the increased volume from this line could potentially double volume of closed business.
the number of financing transactions. This posed many challenges to its origination business processes:
quoting, credit, documents, booking and funding. These processes already demanded a high degree • By integrating and automating
the complex credit application
of attention from dealer personnel, as well as the client’s own territory managers and personnel.
and approval process,
The situation led the client to look for new ways to handle the projected increases in volume, while
waiting time for credit approval
maintaining or improving transaction processing efficiencies for itself and the dealer network. and documentation has
decreased from several days
The Challenge to just minutes.
The client recognized that, in addition to handling the forecast volume increase, any new solution should
also address four key business issues: • The new technical infrastructure
and application architecture
First, achieve better integration of the origination processes and reduce or eliminate duplicate allows the system to support
entry of information. The client relied on a variety of systems to take financing transactions through vastly increased volumes and
the front-end origination process of quoting, credit approval, document preparation, booking the also allows for new services to
transaction and funding. Each of these processes employed separate systems with little integration. be integrated easily and quickly,
continually enhancing the
Redundant data entry was commonplace.
client’s competitiveness.
Second, automate the credit approval process. Since the credit approval process was manual,
securing credit on a single deal often meant waiting several days as analysts assembled credit • The system’s “auto-packeting”
function lets users generate
reports, financial statements and other required documentation and approvals.
all documents required to close
a deal with a single mouse
Third, empower the dealers with access to the new system.
click, improving efficiency and
user satisfaction.
www.thoughtworks.com

2. Empowering Dealers With A New Loan Origination System
Fourth, improve the configuration management processes support agreement was put into place 3 years ago, there has only
used around the world. The current systems made it difficult been one Priority 1 issue logged requiring support outside local
to manage and upgrade different versions of new functionality business hours.
in the international subsidiaries, limiting the ability to leverage
process improvements across its global enterprise.
The Future
The solution has delivered significant competitive advantage for
Working Towards A Solution the client and their dealer network. Dealers are delighted with
ThoughtWorks and the client utilized a contextual inquiry approach a decreased cost-of-sale and an increased ability to close new
with a subset of dealers to uncover improvement opportunities business. They report being able to originate a deal, approve credit,
from the user point of view. This approach entailed observation generate documents, book the transaction and receive funding in
of the origination process as carried out by external users and of as little as 36 hours. As one user said, “Once I key in a deal, which
how the origination system was used to support the process. The takes about 10 minutes, I get a quick credit decision, sometimes in
findings were tabulated in the form of system and process change seconds. I can generate and turn around documents and then have
recommendations, prioritized based on the associated business them out to my salesmen in the field to be signed, all usually within
value and implemented in the system. 24 hours or less.”
The changes were comprehensive but broken up into small releases Within the client’s internal processing units, turnaround time and
of business functionality to begin delivering business value as operating costs for dealer support and customer-facing processes
quickly as possible. The first release web-enabled the previously continue to decrease, while transaction volume increases. With the
manual process of gathering credit application data, producing an origination system in place, the client has gone to market with online
automated credit score for internal users. Subsequent releases services which provide customers with around-the-clock, online
implemented horizontal slices of functionality based on product access to real-time account information.
type, starting with the most frequently used products. Functionality
was initially deployed to internal users, then to dealers after the first
product type was completed, and later expanded into additional ThoughtWorks is a registered trademark of ThoughtWorks, Inc.
countries based on contribution to the overall portfolio size. The
releases to production occur every 2-3 months and 25 releases © 2008 ThoughtWorks, Inc. All rights reserved.
have been made to date.
Because the initial releases were so heavily focused on delivering
business value, the team planned a series of technical releases
that would improve the system infrastructure and ensure that the
application will continue to perform at higher business levels and be
easy to scale and add functionality.
In addition to the evolution of new features into the system,
ThoughtWorks provides 24x7 support services aimed at
investigating and correcting issues which arise in production and
implementing small enhancements. Service level expectations
based on issue severity were established and monitored. Since the
www.thoughtworks.com