Bank of Ireland Mortgages:
Growing the business, not the overhead
How did one of the main UK mortgage providers increase its business by 50% with no additional resources?
Stewart Wright, Managing Director of Bank of Ireland Mortgages (BIM), had big plans for the UK mortgage division of the Bank of Ireland group. The company, which serves the UK mortgage broker community, needed to provide 'best-in-class' service levels to its brokers, in order to provide them with a competitive advantage.
Wright needed a pragmatic partner to deliver long-term sustainable improvements; he chose VISION.
New approach
VISION carried out extensive interviews with employees and brokers to:
- determine the opportunities for improving business performance and processes
- establish where the barriers to growth existed within the organisation.
New processes and procedures were designed, piloted and implemented. Existing IT systems were enhanced to realign the technology to the new processes and therefore maximise efficiency. For example, data input and mortgage assessment processes were redesigned to enable potential borrowers to obtain an underwritten decision, in principle, within three hours.
Confidence and responsibility
VISION knew BIM needed to improve the skills and capacity of its people to speed up the development of new offers to prospective customers and build new channels.
To improve the capacity and skill sets of the employees, especially in the critical area of underwriting, formal 'coaching' practices were developed and introduced. Their purpose was twofold - to build skills and competencies and manage the morale and confidence of staff that worked with the new system and processes.
Employees now feel confident to take on increasing levels of responsibility and work together to drive business process improvements across the company.
Emotional commitment
Wright comments: 'With style and energy, the whole VISION team fitted into the company. I believe that it has added measurably to the success of the project that everyone from VISION has shown real emotional commitment to BIM's business success and not just this project.'
This enabled the organisation to sustain changes in the company and to encourage the sharing of best operational practices.
More effective processes and the greater alignment of technology have improved service levels dramatically, satisfied customer demands and improved conversion rates of business; for example, the Approved In Principle conversion rates improved from 25% to 50%.
Rated and recommended
VISION'S work with BIM helped ensure that it retained a five star rating for service in the UK Financial Adviser awards in November 2000. The IFAA/Financial Adviser survey 2000 ranked BIM fourth in the UK lending market for quality of service.
Client satisfaction
With VISION, we achieved clearly measurable improvements in the motivation and capacity of people across the business.
Stewart Wright, Managing Director BIM Mortgages