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Customer Success Story Financial Services

Agensi Kaunseling Dan Pengurusan


Kredit (AKPK)
Overview
Agensi Kaunseling Dan Pengurusan Kredit (AKPK) is an agency setup by Bank Negara Malaysia in April 2006 to
provide financial counselling and debt management services to the Malaysian public. Being a central bank
initiative, AKPK also strives to provide financial education to help individuals take control of their financial
situation and appreciate the wise use of credit.

Challenge
In order to help individuals address their financial difficulties, AKPK counselors provide advice and counseling
on personal financial management. For customers who require AKPK Debt Management Program (DMP), the
counselors will review their monthly expenditures and loan obligations to determine the net disposable income
before they formulate the loan restructuring proposals for individual customers. This process involves the
customers having to list down all their expenses and debt obligations in the application forms, of which the
information contained therein is subsequently translated into a spreadsheet by the counselors. The AKPK
counselors will then need to obtain customers loan information from the customers creditors i.e. financial
institutions via fax and e-mail to perform manual verification and finalize the restructuring proposal. Once the
proposal is approved, an offer letter is manually prepared and sent to the customer.
All business processes were handled manually; as a result the turnaround time to process an application
averaged between 45 to 60 working days. Although AKPK had a set of well defined standard operating
procedures to assist applicants in enrolling into the Debt Management Program (DMP), AKPKs management
knew automation was key to ensure a healthy turnaround time to service increasing number of applicants.
To date, there are 8 AKPK branches across Malaysia. Some of these branches have recorded huge demand for
AKPK services. In an effort to help improve the turnaround time taken to process applicants enrollment into the
Debt Management Program, some cases from high demand branches were transferred to AKPK counselors in
other branches to assist with the processing. It became evident that a centralized system was needed to handle
this process as manual transfer of cases was time consuming and incurred additional cost.
AKPKs counselors would often liaise with financial institutions over telephony & fax to obtain applicants credit

Highlights
Challenges:

Customer Benefits &


Results:

Manual method in processing


documents

Consolidated processes cuts


down effort to assess customer
application

Lengthy turnaround time to


respond to customers

Improved user experience in


processing applications

Too much manual interaction


with creditors required

Improved turnaround time for


application approval

APKP - Datamation

Enhanced operational efficiency


Audit trail enforced to track
changes
Increased customer confidence
Full audit trail and access control
on document check-in and
check-out procedures

Customer Success Story

information to support the successful enrollment of an applicant into the Debt Management Program. This
process was time consuming and was not efficient in supporting AKPKs overall objective in reducing the
turnaround time to process an application. The necessity for a self serving portal where financial institutions and
AKPK could commonly share information became critical.
The number of documents processed grew as the client base became larger and larger. Retrieval of physical
documents was time consuming, thus the viable choice was to implement a document management system to
ensure scanned images of documents were stored in electronic folders.

Solution
As AKPKs challenges started to grow at an exponential rate, Datamation was awarded the project to deploy an
enterprise solution capable of improving the processes within AKPK. With that objective, Credit Counselling &
Debt Management System (CCDMS) was conceived; using a combination of cutting edge technology from
Enterprise software ReadSoft Form Processing and Metastorm Business Process Management (BPM).
The birth of CCDMS paved the way for Data Automation. Applicants could directly submit an application online
via AKPKs web portal. Physical application forms are no longer required to be manually processed by AKPKs
counselors; the forms were fed into a scanner and all vital information was automatically captured into CCDMS
using ReadSoft Form Processing. With Metastorm BPM, workflows were built to manage AKPKs processes
and to directly interchange customers credit information with Financial Institutions electronically. Customers
satisfaction and confidence undeniably grew as AKPKs reputation to assist distress borrowers soared.

Results
The average turnaround time for customers application processing dropped from 60 days to within 30 days, on
occasions as fast as 14 working days. With a reputable and proven solution in place, the exponential growth in
terms of customers application is no longer a concern for AKPK. As of June 2008, there are 15,000 successful
applicants enrolled into the Debt Management Program and 40,000 more who have attended AKPKs
counselling sessions. More customers are coming in as awareness of AKPKs services grew.
The deployment of a centralized system promoted a unified workforce. AKPK counselors from any branch can
review and assess any case captured centrally by CCDMS as the distribution mechanism developed by
Metastorm BPM automatically distributed the workload across all users. This further improved the turnaround
time in assessing a case as it gave AKPK the ability to distribute the workload evenly.
With all business processes automated, a reduction in consumables wastage was evident. With financial
institutions able to access the self serving portal to retrieve and update applicants credit information, there was
no longer a need to wait for information via fax or e-mail as everything was made available electronically through
CCDMS.
With CCDMS, AKPK customers were provided monthly notification via SMS on payment due date. Counselors
were now able to identify customer payment trend and follow up with cases where payments were either short or
not made at all efficiently and accurately. With automated reconciliation using CCDMS reconciliation program,
AKPKs finance division can now produce accurate reports on customers payment status with ease. The
CCDMS has also enabled AKPK to offer customers the ability to make payments via the Financial Process
Exchange (FPX) facility where the customers payment records are processed and updated promptly into the
system.
Customers information are now processed and stored securely in an Enterprise Relational Database
Management System (RDBMS). All document scanned using ReadSoft Form Processing are stored securely on
a file server. Branch access to the CCDMS system is only possible via Virtual Private Network (VPN), thus

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Customer Success Story

increasing the security for remote access. All transaction processing performed in CCDMS are also audit trailed
by Metastorm BPM and stored securely within the database. System users are assured that they are following
standard operating procedures as all processes within CCDMS are controlled by Metastorm BPM.
The introduction of ViewWise Integrated Document Management System complemented CCDMS to provide an
end-to-end data automation process. Physical supporting documents provided by the customer are digitized
and stored into iDMS. These documents are tagged to the customers profile on CCDMS, allowing counselors to
retrieve them in a matter of seconds at the click of a button. Document retrieval time was dramatically reduced;
which directly improved the turnaround time to service customers. Every document that is checked in and out of
iDMS is audit trailed and controlled by user access rights which eliminated documents potentially being
misplaced. Multiple copies of documents were no longer made and kept by individual counselors as everything
was stored online. As documents are now stored electronically, backup copies can easily be made by AKPK
system administrators to auxiliary media and stored securely on site and off site, which safeguards customers
vital information from being destroyed in an event of any disaster.
The success with AKPK does not stop here. As new requirements arise, so does the need for the enterprise
solution to evolve. CCDMS is built using best of breed solutions; which translate to AKPK having the ability to
deploy new components as and when required to better service the people that matter most; AKPKs customers
and the means to transform AKPK to a paper-less environment.

Copyright 2008, Metastorm Inc. All rights reserved. Enterprise Process Advantage, Metastorm BPM, Metastorm Discovery, Metastorm
DNA, Metastorm Enterprise, Process Pod and ProVision are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Metastorm Inc. Other product,
service and company names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
9.22.2008.

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Customer Success Story

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