Blue Prism has teamed-up with Lateetud and ABBYY to support the US government’s latest COVID-19 relief efforts for small businesses, by helping to automate loan applications during the two rounds of funding, $349 billion and $310 billion respectively, allocated by Congress as part of its SBA Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The solution, currently being used by several U.S. banks, uses Digital Workers to automate process loan applications in a matter of seconds, for same-day approvals.

The PPP is designed to serve as a lifeline for small businesses with fewer than 500 employees until the economy reopens. By effectively automating the loan approval process, this partnership will be essential in the rapid processing of these loans and helping small businesses stay afloat. With the second round of PPP funding drying up, thousands of potential borrowers that are looking for aid during the pandemic may be shut out.

The daily demand for loans is more than the SBA processes in an entire year. Loan applicants are frustrated with the amount of time it takes to process the loan applications end-to-end, including filing and receiving timely status updates. To keep up, First Home Bank partnered with Blue Prism, Lateetud and ABBYY to automate the entire end-to-end loan application and submission process.

Below is a breakdown of the benefits the bank has received automating its SBA PPP loan approval process.

• 10 digital workers have the capacity to process up to 14,000 loan applications per-day
• 30x faster than completing the process manually
• Entire automated end-to-end process in under two minutes
• Production ready in less than two days
• Due diligence and fraud detection checking
• Enterprise security and scalability
• Full audit trail, 100 percent compliance and accuracy
• Deploy on-prem or cloud platform of choice (Azure, AWS, Google)

“The ability to respond and automate at this hyper-level is a game changer and made a real difference in people’s lives,” says Thomas Zernick, President, SBA Lending Division of at First Home Bank. “We are closing in on saving around 85,000 jobs and $770 mil in loans secured. With Lateetud delivering Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce, 99 percent of loans are processed on the day of application. We are also using the technology to automate upstream and downstream activities like application validation and loan closures, respectively. As a next step we are working with Lateetud and Blue Prism on automating the loan forgiveness process.”

While SBA’s mandate prohibits the use of RPA GUI interfaces into E-Tran, Blue Prism and Lateetud have a solution available immediately with XML file upload access into E-Tran, which adheres to the latest SBA policy.  The value proposition of accelerating the end-to-end process from application submission, to bank review and approval, underwriting, SBA upload and payment remains strong. In addition, Blue Prism has extended the capability to other emerging applications including SBA PPP loan forgiveness, good standing checks, void checks for fraud, OFAC checks, and mortgage forbearance. To learn more about the Blue Prism, ABBYY and Lateetud solution click here.

“We saw this challenge and it had all the right attributes for the type of Intelligent Automation (IA) solutions we create using Blue Prism, ABBYY and other AI technologies to help our banking customers. It was beset with large volume, short time span and manual steps,” says Pawan Jadhav, CEO of Lateetud, an Intelligent Process Automation company. “As part of the next phase in SBA PPP, we’ve created loan forgiveness solution powered by Blue prism and other AI technologies to help banks tackle this complex and laborious process and like the previous solution it can be deployed in matter of days.”

“This is a time when organizations need AI enabling tools to quickly ramp up their automation efforts and enhance business process efficiency,” says Neil Murphy, Vice President of Global Business Development at ABBYY, a Digital Intelligence company. “The complexity of processing various forms of documents for SBA PPP loan forgiveness is simplified with content intelligence solutions that quickly and accurately digitize, understand and process data provided by small businesses. Our goal is to take the content-centric process burdens from financial services organizations so they can focus on serving their customers.”