Quality, fast delivery & professionalism

Challenge

BCR LEASING IFN is one of the most important leasing companies, existing on the |Romanian market since 2001. It is a subsidiary of Banca Comercială Română and part of ERSTE Group, an outstanding financial group in Central and Eastern Europe.

With 12 branches and around 100 employees, the company is currently offering a complete range of financial leasing services. Since its establishment, BCR LEASING IFN focused on offering high quality services, innovation and adapting the products to the market requirements.

The leasing companies were strongly affected by the economic crisis in 2008. The business suffered because the financings decreased by almost 75% and the leasing companies had to face the impact of non-performing financing and the growing number of recovered goods. 

After winning the battle of non-performing financing and due to the pressure put on productivity and efficiency, the company had to reinvent itself and to improve its internal processes and the quality of the services offered to the clients. Given these two directions, BCR Leasing aimed to regain its market leader position, focusing on customer orientation.

The studies dedicated to the leasing market indicated that the documentation required to the clients and the response time to funding requests were the most important indicators in shaping customers’ perception regarding the quality of the financial services.      

Since 2012, BCR Leasing had started to improve its response time to less than 8 hours, but it was not enough. It needed a radical and innovative approach.

As ERSTE group did, BCR Leasing fixed an ambitious target: to give response right away, at the customer’s first visit to the dealer or in its branches. It was necessary to automate the following processes: customer data entry, external sources inquiry in order to have access to the file documentation and to verify the customer’s creditworthiness according to the National Bank requirements. For these processes were manual, they were exposed to a high operational risk and required special attention.

The solution to automate the financial analysis process was a system developed with ERSTE Group, which was improved and fine-tuned for about one year. This system had to be “filled” with data.
 

Because the ‘data’ represented the common denominator in many processes, BCR Leasing started to study the market in order to find a ‘data’ provider. These companies specialized in collecting and aggregating data from many external sources offering a uniform source of information. Based on this source, different reports could be searched or generated/downloaded. These companies had already offered banking services, becoming more and more desired during the economic crisis, a period when the risk management and the debt collection had a high significance.
 

It was necessary for BCR Leasing to insert the customer data, the financial indicators and other relevant information from various public sources in Charisma Leasing web solution, simplifying thereby the data entry and the financial analysis. In order to offer safety to this financing process some of these data had to be available in real time.

After an elaborate selection process BCR Leasing chose Starbyte as a query and web services provider. Starbyte distinguished itself among other competitors due to the fact that it holds the most complex portfolio regarding services and data about the companies in Romania. Moreover, after examining the requests, it was ascertained that through a technical department, with a large experience in financial implementations, some of the BCR Leasing request could be solved only by this company.

Everything was to integrate with Charisma Leasing Management provided by TotalSoft, the solution BCR Leasing has been using to operate its entire leasing and back-office activity for over 10 years. The results were amazing: the preliminary approval response can now be received within a few minutes, after completing the unique registration code, the asset data, deposit and number of installments, by simply clicking a button, without any other financial document required. Subsequently, the final approval can be received in less than an hour.

Behind the user interface, the data regarding customers, shareholders or other data received from the Trade Register, Ministry of Public Finance are drawn automatically. The queries are highlighted in Charisma Leasing Management can be attached without manual operation or processing.

The project was challenging both in terms of novelty, the integration between Charisma Leasing Management and the Starbyte data services, being a premiere on the Romanian market, and  in terms of working methodology specially created to insure the project’s success and of the mixed team of the involved specialists.

In less than a month after the implementation, the approved deals increased by 20%, the preliminary response is given almost immediately and the final approval time is shorter than 2 hours for most of the funding files.

The operational costs can be reduced by 35% given that the queries are not necessary every time.

The routine in the Back Office departments decreased given that the data or the queries are not manually inserted, which led to productivity growth.

The solution is to be used in most of the BCR branches, thus, the Back Office departments can take over more funding requests.

Using the data transmission web services provided by Starbyte, BCR Leasing anticipates an increased quality level of the system data. Every new funding, all the data of the existing clients are updated. Moreover, mechanisms regulating the data insertion in a coherent and effective way were developed to make the integration possible. In the medium to long term, this will function as a ‘self-healing’ system for the wrong data in the BCR Leasing systems.

Besides providing web services data, BCR Leasing has access to the Starbyte web application that the sales, marketing, collection and legal departments may use.

“The services provided by Starbyte and the TotalSoft solutions help us offer rapid and quality services and improve our image” states the IT Manager.
 

 Case study written 2014