In mid-March, OP Financial Group announced that its customers can apply for a repayment holiday for their home loan without any charge. The applications have been received in large numbers; the weekly volume is more than tenfold compared with the normal time. Although OP recruited more customer service persons, applications nevertheless were received faster than these could be processed by the customer service persons.
OP’s Mortgages arrived at a new kind of decision to speed up application processing and support customer service persons. Processing is exactly the kind of job that a robot does well: work requiring accuracy and speed. OP built three different robots to process applications – they pre-process, make and implement decisions.
“It is important that we can now respond to the applications as soon as possible when the financial standing of many customers is challenging due to the coronavirus pandemic. Robots comply with regulation and information security requirements as strictly as humans do”, states Kaisu Christie, SVP, Mortgages, Collateral and Real Estate Services at OP. Since mid-March, OP has processed up to 28,000 repayment holiday applications.
OP Financial Group developed the robots from start to finish, and the situation that has proceeded fast necessitated their quick adoption in the changed situation. At the moment, the robots are able to pre-process up to 3,000 applications per day and make hundreds of repayment holiday decisions every day. OP is among Finland’s largest users of software robotics and has for a long time now built custom robots and other automated solutions for rapidly solving the needs of customers.
“In this case, development work is far more promptly than usual, considering the great need for solutions among customers. While we could speed up the processing of our customers’ applications, we learned a great deal when it comes to our further development work. We are also currently examining how robots can be utilised to solve other challenges caused by the coronavirus, says Juho Malmberg, EVP, Development and Technologies at OP Financial Group.