When one thinks of digitization and automation in financial services, dynamic areas such as payments and digital wallets (think Venmo, Apple Pay) come to mind.

Commercial lending, on the other hand, is a document- and process-intensive business with origination teams finding the deal, underwriting teams crunching the numbers, credit teams opining on probability of default, legal teams creating loan documents and, finally, operations teams undertaking the monthly servicing of the loans for a period of anywhere from one to seven (or more) years.

There are some areas within commercial lending, such as negotiating fees and terms for a borrower, where automation will not make sense, but there are others where it is starting to make a difference.

From our work benchmarking various commercial lenders, we are seeing robotic process automation (RPA) being applied in the following areas: Read On: