City National Bank set out to achieve automation for better customer service. Automation is saving 40 hours of work time each day. Then when Covid-19 hit, they were able to deploy a bot to process SBA loans in just 2 days.
City National Bank strives to improve both the working life of their colleagues and the customer experience by using innovative ways to achieve process excellence.
Los Angeles–based CNB is known as the "Bank to the Stars" due to its relationship with many renowned Hollywood, television, and theater clients. CNB offers a full complement of highly personal banking, trust, and investment services, delivered by 5,200 colleagues dedicated to giving all clients “the star treatment.”
When VP of Process Excellence David Hernandez set out to identify candidates for automation with an eye to better customer service, as well as the highest return on investment, he quickly homed in on the client onboarding process.
Client onboarding proves success with RPA
Hernandez and his team were able to successfully reduce the new client onboarding time from 10 minutes to under one minute. UiPath Robotic Process Automation (RPA) also enables clients to order checks, request fee waivers, and order replacement debit and credit cards in just seconds—activities that used to take several minutes of a colleague’s time.
Even with only two robots deployed, all those saved minutes add up to 40 hours of work time saved each day—equivalent to seven full-time employees. That time savings not only provides a better customer experience for clients, it also frees colleagues to spend more time helping clients with additional high-touch, value-added encounters.
In his quest for process excellence, Hernandez says that he will be exploring UiPath RPA for other use cases, such as finance, accounting, and other back office operations.
David HernandezThe partnership has been great … the involvement and the flexibility that UiPath
offers as well as having a customer success manager [as a single point of contact] is really critical for us.
VP Process Excellence, City National Bank
PPP loan applications cause massive influx during Covid-19
When the US SBA announced the small business relief program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hernandez knew exactly what to do. He and his team jumped into action, automating the SBA loan application and submission process in just two days and using one robot. The automation enabled CNB to handle the massive influx of PPP loan applications for relief from COVID-19 impact without overburdening existing staff members.
Hernandez was able to:
- Optimize inbound loan processing
- Integrate and streamline existing underwriting approval processes
- Automatically submit accurate data into the SBA approval portal
David Hernandez - VP Process Excellence, City National BankClient contact centers is going to be one of our next focus areas to see how we can implement automation and start to implement attended automation in all of our client facing roles as well. We would like to get to a point where every colleague that’s client facing has an attended bot to support them and to drive value for themselves and for the clients.
Interview on SPA application process.
BY THE NUMBERS
- 10xClient onboarding to under 1 min
- 40 Hours a day saved onboarding
- 2 daysTime to deploy SBA robot
- 3unattended processes
