BayCoast Bank expansion soars with automation powered by Talend API

BayCoast Bank, a regional bank serving Massachusetts and Rhode Island, provides core banking, investment services, personal/commercial insurance, and home/residential mortgage services through 24 regional branches and four affiliate organizations. “As a community institution first and foremost, we want to provide the best solutions and service that we can to the communities that we serve,” explained Dan DeCosta, Chief Information Officer at BayCoast Bank. With a laser focus on providing consistent best-in-class customer experiences, BayCoast Bank is thinking big in terms of expansion and investment in the right technology. 

“From a technology and data modernization standpoint, we want to be comparing ourselves to Bank of America and Wells Fargo, not regional banks of similar size,” Dan said. With the purchase of Priority Funding in 2016, BayCoast Bank was primed for a nationwide loan program expansion and capitalized on an unexpected opportunity in an often-overlooked market: manufactured home loans. 

Niche loans - with a catch 

As with every loan in a booming housing market, the demand for these loans was accelerating – but the qualification nuances and comparatively low approval rates made these loans a less-attractive offering for many banks. This created the perfect niche for Priority Funding, an umbrella organization of BayCoast Bank, to expand their loan program – but there was a catch. Manufactured loans carried a rejection rate of nearly 70%, proving time-consuming to review and requiring manual, inefficient workflows. Submitting applications to credit reporting sites had to be done manually – repetitive form-filling that was eating up precious time on each application. 

“There’s already a lot of anxiety surrounding that application process for customers,” Dan said. “We had to make the process faster with such a high rejection rate.” The manual process of reviewing applications was painstakingly slow and susceptible to error. If BayCoast Bank wanted to truly own this niche, they needed the power of automation on their side. 

Workflow automation for digital transformation 

As a trusted Talend partner and consultant for BayCoast Bank, Passerelle worked to develop an in-house solution: Talend Cloud API. Using Talend, Baycoast could add API connections at all critical points in the application process – virtually eliminating manual entry from the loan process. Dan quickly saw the positive impact. “With automation in action, loan officers didn’t need to spend hours on applications destined for rejection – they could provide faster responses during an already-stressful time for the applicant.” 

Talend Cloud API slashed loan application times from several days to mere seconds. In turn, loan processors could focus on working on approved loans instead of manually closing out rejected loans.  

As Priority Funding expands to 14 states and counting, automation has been key to growing successfully. “Priority Funding will be able to continue to expand into more states without needing to add more and more office staff,” Dan said. “They are prepared to grow and handle all the work that’s going to come with it.” 

Beyond automation with Talend + Salesforce 

As Priority Funding eyes nationwide expansion, BayCoast Bank remains focused on delivering value to their customers at a regional level – but they needed more than automation to handle the growing amount of customer data. With a complex ecosystem of source system, 3rd party application, and business users, Talend’s integration with Salesforce proved critical for managing data across the busy organization.

“With Talend, we can very quickly integrate data from all our core systems into Salesforce for consolidated customer information,” Dan explained. “We can pull up a customer, see what they have for deposits, loans, insurance, and investments – all in one place.” By taking control of their data ecosystem, BayCoast Bank drastically reduced the time it took teams to find and use critical customer data.   

Automation initiatives coupled with data management also helps ensure regulatory compliance. “When people talk about automation routines, they don’t necessarily talk about the accuracy of the data,” Dan said. “If I gave somebody 100 loans to enter in a system manually, there’s going to be at least one mistake in those 100 loans. If I automate it through Talend, there won’t be a single error.” 

With guidance and support from Passerelle and Talend at the core of their data modernization, Dan and his data team deliver daily on their day one goal: providing customer value across the entire BayCoast Bank enterprise. 

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