Credit: BofA Accelerates Credit Application Approval

Bank of America is using a high-speed credit application document imaging system to process up to 20,000 credit card applications each day without outsourcing. Now the bank can do all of its credit card processing by itself, at three times the speed and half the cost. "Our data capture productivity has increased 40 percent, and now it takes one day instead of two weeks to train a data entry operator," says Marcia Heath, manager of technical systems in Bank of America's Phoenix-based credit operations unit. "We expect full payback on this implementation in less than a year."

The workflow system is based on software from FileNet Corp. of Costa Mesa, CA, and FileNet partner ICG Consulting, based in Phoenix, which modified the system to work for Bank of America.

ICG brought the software's image read rate to 90 percent, says ICG senior partner Maurice Rodriguez. Neural robots enable the system to read documents unattended, finding errors and sending them to a special queue along with an explanation of the error. Bank of America is so far the only bank using any kind of neural robotics system.

ICG's effort has reduced the bank's outside processing costs by $1.2 million a year, allowing the bank to transfer employees to other activities and speeding customer service response time by reducing date retrieval from days to seconds. Customers can now apply for a credit card and receive it - if approved-within 24 hours.

-peterson tfn.com