Rabobank has developed a solution to automate government relief on COVID-19 related loan repayments

May 20, 2020

Dutch Rabobank has just unveiled some tools to streamline COVID-19 related loan modifications that have already saved the bank 50,000 hours of work.

The news comes after the Dutch government installed measures to help small businesses survive the coronavirus fallout. Specifically, those who have loans with microcredit providers don’t have to repay their loan for a period of six months. Additionally, during this period, the interest on those loans will be reduced to 2%.

“As the Dutch government provides much-needed loan relief to support struggling businesses dealing with significant turnover losses, the job falls on lending institutions like Rabobank to institutionalise the programme and modify loan documents accordingly,” said Eugenie Wouterse, product owner robotics at Rabobank Lending.

“This presented a massive challenge as ordinarily we would have had to do this manually. But in only five days we were able to build a Kofax RPA robot to automate the process and in only ten days the robot processed the first activity. We believe this will help our customers by accelerating relief to struggling businesses – while at the same time saving us approximately 50,000 hours of manual work.”

The robot tools was created together with Kofax, a supplier of intelligent automation software to digitally transform end-to-end business processes.

“This is one of many robots we’ve created since COVID-19,” said Steven van Uffelen, head of the robotics CoE of Rabobank. “After three years of continuous optimisation, refining our approach and working with our partner, Kofax, to expand the features of the tool, the Robotics Centre of Excellence is now able to deliver a steady stream of value in short timescales, and therefore play a crucial role in delivering important services to our clients, even in times of rapid change. We’re now able to leverage our team of citizen developers and an extensive library of building blocks to deploy optimised and robust robots in one-two weeks in almost any part of the business.”