RESULTS
Since implementing ACES and expanding its use across the organization, Mountain America has:
- Eliminated manual population pulls and stratifications for loan sampling.
- Gained greater control over loan review activities, including question sets, workflows and testing.
- Increased visibility into findings, reporting and trending.
- Centralized communication between departments.
Centralized Communication
One of the biggest challenges in Mountain America’s previous quality review process was the quality control team’s ability to share findings with other team members across the organization. Using ACES CONNECT, Mountain America’s quality control team has created a hub for all communications related to quality issues to ensure issues are shared in an accurate and timely manner. For Fairbanks, the immediacy of the feedback her team can provide employees about areas for improvement greatly enhances Mountain America’s ability to keep quality at the forefront of its operations.
“ACES CONNECT has enabled us to increase efficiency in defect/error remediation across the board, but we’ve found it especially useful in communicating with front-line staff about corrections to the account opening process,” said Fairbanks.
“In addition, we’ve cut our review turn times for consumer loans to within five business days of closing, which has been one of the largest improvements for my team internally.”
With this expedited review process, Mountain America has been able to increase accountability, as employees are less resistant to feedback because issues are identified and shared earlier.
“Before, our team would conduct its review and then prepare and post a report with our findings, which was published well after the issues identified in the report had occurred. Furthermore, we had to rely on employees opening and reviewing the report to discover what issues they needed to address.” Fairbanks explained. “Because ACES enables us to communicate errors to employees right when we find them, our employees can course-correct before errors or issues become ingrained in their day-to-day activities,”
360 Insights
ACES not only enabled Mountain America to quickly and easily share immediate findings across the organization, but it also enhanced Mountain America’s ability to aggregate and report on its findings.
“With our previous process, we could only provide data on our quality reviews one month at a time, which made it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of errors and compare our findings over time,” Fairbanks said. “Now, because all our findings are housed in ACES’ flexible reporting database, we can identify trends, and as we implement processes to correct those errors, we can see how our numbers are improving month after month, which makes it a lot easier to demonstrate the effectiveness of those changes and our review process as a whole.”
The ability to document both quality issues and remediation plans is critical when faced with a regulatory exam. As a result of the January 2021 memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Fairbanks has noted the credit union will be subject to a higher level of scrutiny from NCUA, its prudential regulator. ACES will help Mountain America manage this increase in regulatory oversight.
“As far as regulatory risk, we have greater insight into what's happening and the ability to justify what we're doing through documentation thanks to ACES. In the event of an audit or exam, we have a tool that seamlessly drills into the specifics of our procedures and how they are being followed,” Fairbanks said.
Increased Accuracy and Efficiency
Using ACES as the single system of record for all things quality-related has empowered Mountain America to enhance its enterprise-wide culture of quality by creating a unified quality review process across the organization. With the tracking abilities ACES provides, Mountain America can easily look back to pinpoint oversights and unrealized risks to build a review process around these findings. Ultimately, streamlining operations and nurturing investor confidence with their sound process.
“We now have data in one central location, we can build improved organizational reporting, moving away from disparate processes. ACES makes it possible for us to effectively rate performance and measure performance against established key performance indicators. The ability to provide this level of reporting is a key tool for demonstrating the effectiveness of our quality control and monitoring functions,” said Fairbanks.
For Fairbanks and her team, these improvements in accuracy have also yielded significant efficiency gains in both reviews and reporting.
“Volume-wise, our reviewers went from struggling to complete one to two mortgage reviews per day to easily completing three or four, and we’ve seen similar results with our consumer lending reviews,” she said. “It also used to take several hours to pull a report and get through the data. Now, once we have the initial report built in ACES, we can simply run it rather than rebuilding it every month, which is a huge time-saver.”
“While we initially chose ACES based on its reputation for improving loan quality and reducing lending risk, the challenges that the technology addresses and the benefits that it delivers are pretty universal across our organization,” Fairbanks added.
“Across the board, our teams have been very excited about the increased accuracy, increased accountability and the efficiencies ACES delivers.”
