Loan and Real Estate Advisory
LOANCOS GmbH.
The LOANCOS Group is the biggest independent lending platform for setting up and managing mortgage portfolios in Germany. It provides banks, insurers and investors with efficient, scalable management tools for loan portfolios, especially for mortgages in the housing industry.
LOANCOS combines many years of expert knowledge and technical skills in the solution of problems. Its modular outsourcing platform makes it an enabler for new business in the financing of construction projects, while being efficiently integrated into the value chain with intermediary platforms. This allows banks and insurance companies to be flexible in setting up or expanding their construction loan business. The BPO platform offers comprehensive support for all loan operations: from the granting of loans and payments to intensive support and workouts (special servicing).
Task
As part of a large-scale project with an overall volume of more than 25,000 staff days, LOANCOS had been looking for a scanning contractor who would take over the central management and digitisation of all its previous and current mortgage contracts, stored in Essen, Frankfurt am Main and especially Berlin. The company decided on REISSWOLF after benefiting from its pre-purchase consultancy services and being impressed with the resulting efficiency increases and cost savings. It turned out that the full-scale digitisation of the company’s documents would have required a 6-digit investment volume, which was unnecessary as many of the files no longer needed to be accessible on a daily basis but were archived for specific periods to satisfy legal retention requirements.
After an initial on-site survey, the original plan was modified in consultation with the main customer. There were clear requirements as to what would be needed and when – and what would probably not be needed at all or only in a few years’ time.
Instead of full-scale digitisation, it was agreed that the contractual documents would be divided into three types: active, current and legacy. All documents that needed to be managed and processed actively were prepared for scanning directly upon delivery and were then converted to PDF and made accessible in this format. Depending on the requirement, all other documents were to be digitised either as scan-on-demand or, alternatively, continued to be archived in purely analogue form.
The project started in Berlin, where 1,260 boxes containing around 23,000 dossiers were filled and collected within one week. When filling the boxes, a distinction was made between prioritised and non-prioritised files. In all, 1,265 prioritised dossiers were digitised and made available to the customer on a daily basis – dossiers that differed both in volume and in their components.
As requested by the customer, all non-priority files were digitised over the next few months and have since then been kept in a standardised form. At first, we received our instructions manually, via the REISSWOLF Archive Manager.
But we quickly developed an API interface together, enabling the customer to instruct us via its own DMS, so that this process can now proceed automatically.
Documents which were unlikely to be needed any longer were marked digitally immediately upon scanning. Once they had been checked and approved by the end customer, they could be fed directly into a certified shredder. All documents requiring mandatory retention were placed in REISSWOLF’s high-security archives.
By splitting files into prioritised and non-prioritised files, it was possible to reduce the time pressure created by the workload. This provided maximum control over the challenge that active files had to become available for processing as quickly as possible. The digitised contracts were not transferred in a single batch, but gradually, following a daily rhythm, as soon as they became available.
Customer benefit
To handle its long-term requirements on contract management, LOANCOS was given an interface between its own DMS and the REISSWOLF archiving application, so that it could request digital and/or physical files through this interface. REISSWOLF receives requests on an almost daily basis and then sends the relevant digitised files to the customer within the agreed time frame.
Files are transmitted to the customer’s system automatically via an SFTP server. This provides an efficient digital solution with major benefits for LOANCOS’ customer in particular, as contract details are now easily accessible to anyone who needs to work with them. In addition, should the customer still require certain original (physical) files, then those, too, can be sent without any trouble. The customer benefits from more secure archiving conditions than before, while at the same time no longer needing to keep its own archives.
Customer feedback
REISSWOLF was continually accessible to LOANCOS, providing a high level of expertise – and indeed despite major challenges to its logistics and planning, as all the files had to be collected at short notice, while the prioritised files had to be made available for processing quickly, within the first four weeks. Not to mention the comprehensive Covid-19 hygiene measures that REISSWOLF had to put in place during collection.
“It was amazing to see how much material was moved within four weeks and, in some cases, made available again on a digital basis the following day.” Obviously, not everything went smoothly at first, as the digital data didn’t reach our system in automated form straight away. But the procedure underwent continuous improvement, and so we soon had a perfect solution and eventually also the connection to our system.
To conclude, thanks to REISSWOLF, we achieved our goal of providing our customer with digital procedures that significantly improve its work efficiency. Everything also worked out extremely well on a personal level, which is just as important.” Markus Discher, Head of Collection
The next step
Now that all the procedures are well established and the necessary information is available whenever it is required, we have agreed a number of follow-up orders. We’ve now come to a point where all new contracts are continuously collected at weekly intervals and are then digitised straight away, while certificates, etc. are also physically archived.
The next step will be to check which other LOANCOS customers might have their systems converted to this convenient hybrid archiving system, where digital files are directly available while analogue files are managed in a digital system and can easily be retrieved whenever necessary.
In addition, LOANCOS is planning to further optimise its own digital processes, as REISSWOLF will provide it with a digital inbox that includes document recognition and directly assigns documents to the relevant departments of this specialist financial service provider.