Organizational Alignment-157

The Situation:

The client’s industry-leading position in auto insurance uniquely positioned them for success in the vehicle loan business.  While all products were important to the client, auto loans were well-aligned with their core business of auto insurance.  The 17,000 independent Agents were reticent to sell auto loans because the Bank approval process took an average of six hours.  The Highland Group was asked to re-engineer the bank processes and convince the Agents, through positive experiences, focused sales support, and sales force training; and measured by growth, that the Bank was a valuable asset.

The Driver Goal:

Grow vehicle loans to an annual run rate of 200,000.

Actions Taken:

• Re-engineered the loan initiation, underwriting, loan closing, and customer service processes ,
• Built a field sales organization and integrated that organization within the existing structure
• Developed and fielded a new sales paradigm that supported the pivot from the core business to the additional business
• Developed and fielded the sales training and a system for managing that training
• Developed a sustainable system for managing the corporate and field planning and support processes
• Developed business cases and actionable plans for additional channels
• Re-engineered the operation and utilization of the loan system to support automated underwriting
• Built a model that determined and optimized the automated underwriting criteria
• Refined the propensity to buy model and integrated the criteria into target marketing

• Grew the run rate from 107,000 to 200,000 loan initiations per year
• Reduced loan initiation time from an average of six hours to ten minutes with no corresponding increase in staffing
• Reduced customer service wait time from an average of six minutes to less than fifteen seconds with no corresponding increase in staffing
• Implemented a sustainable system for managing auto loan production