About Client
The client is a full-service commercial bank in India. They offer a wide range of products and services such as retail banking, wealth management, private banking, commercial banking, investment banking, corporate finance, housing finance, and management services.
Business Context
Approvals from banks or financial institutions are key indicators of the credibility of commercial or residential housing projects in the real estate sector. However, the approval of real estate or property finance is a very complicated and time-consuming process. It involves manual processing and analysis of information from multiple sources, on-spot verification, legal aspects, market rates before giving the project go-ahead.
The client wanted to digitally transform the process of property finance and real estate lending to reduce credit risks, increase the efficiency and turnaround time (TAT) of project approvals in the best interest of everyone involved — the bank, consumers, and real-estate developers.
The Challenge
The bank’s lending department needs to analyze and verify multiple documents including project plans, government approvals, legal compliance, market evaluation, and financial assurance among others, before approving real-estate or housing projects for creditworthiness. Critical pieces of information contained in multiple documents received from disparate sources add to the complexity associated with the project approvals.
The due diligence process is even more challenging as the lending departments have to keep track of project implementation to approve staggered disbursement of loans to property developers and consumers. The completion of the projects typically varies from a few months to a couple of years depending upon the scale.
Complex and manual workflow for property appraisals
The process was prone to errors in the approval process which exposed banks and financial institutions to credit risks.
No centralized project data repository
Fetching data from multiple sources was a time-consuming process. Also, updating the documents with information about the progress achieved with the projects and making them available for due diligence was riddled with complexities.
The Solution Offering
While proactively searching for technology solutions to overcome the challenges with the current approval process, the bank chose Tejora’s digital Property Finance Appraisal System (PFAS) as the best option to go with. The fully-integrated and feature-rich platform that digitizes the complex property finance appraisal workflow stood out as the most feasible way to achieve process transparency, increase operational efficiency, and avoid credit risks.
We deployed PFAS with a quick configuration process to suit the workflow requirements of the bank’s property finance lending department. It created centralized project documentation and data repository that made it easy for the lending department and associated agencies to access and update information dynamically.
- Digitization of documents and the property finance approval workflow
- Easy management of the interface between branches and agencies, along with document sharing
- Ability to update the system with changes in government policies, regulatory requirements or the workflow, using the highly-configurable rule engine module
Key Features
The PFAS customized for the client generates precise property valuation based on an accurate, proprietary, automated valuation model, thereby reducing the time taken to process loans.
Built on top of extensible open sources frameworks, the platform helps the bank with the workflows associated with both Approved Property Finance (APF) and Non-Approved Property Finance (Non-APF), and comes with the following features:
- Auto-assignment and reminders for subsequent valuations
- Alerts for deviation in special cases
- Alerts to prevent data manipulation for fraud approvals
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Prevention of multiple customers from being funded on the same unit
Tracking of:
- Price movement
- Sanctioned and disbursed exposure
- Project progress
- Automated unit valuation
- Ability to allocate units to customers
- Automated MIS, alerts, and dashboard views for the lending department
- Ability to update agency reports and property photographs
The Impact
The PFAS transformed the traditional process of project approvals and loan disbursement into a transparent and efficient workflow. It reduced processing time and improved loan disbursement decisions.
- Improved data accuracy and work efficiency by 90%
- Mitigated credited risks associated with real estate loans and property finance
- Digitization of workflow resulting in higher customer satisfaction
- Improved TAT with simplified operations
- Allowed for effective use of the existing employee pool for other complicated operations as well as to increase market presence
Tech Stack
