KeyBank accelerates credit cycle times by 20% or more

Challenge

Bringing agility to hyperautomation with low-code

“My goal is to help us think through the art of the possible,” says Dominic. “How can we take on the ever present challenges—maximizing efficiency, minimizing cycle times, delivering the best customer experience—and find better ways to address them?”

That’s the mindset driving KeyBank's hyperautomation strategy.

For about 10 years, KeyBank had incorporated robotic process automation (RPA) for many processes, increasing efficiency piece by piece. But that approach left gaps that needed to be filled by manual work. Now, the bank is taking a more holistic approach.

“It’s business-led, tech-enabled transformation,” says Dominic. “First, we get to know the business needs, then we define the optimal process. We bring in tech at the end so the tech and the architecture support that optimal process.”

The hyperautomation strategy comprises several technology pillars, including intelligent RPA, intelligent document processing (IDP), and AI-driven efficiencies. But to give the strategy agility, Dominic wanted a cohesive, modern development platform that would enable the bank to quickly build custom applications and processes that integrate with these other technologies. To that end, he went looking for the best low-code development platform.

Solution

Delivering enterprise-scale improvements

KeyBank conducted a multi-phase evaluation of low-code solutions. After initially looking at industry analyses of about 200 offerings, it discussed possible solutions with 12 providers, then opted to pilot four low-code solutions over two months.

Dominic says OutSystems was the clear winner because it excelled in several critical areas, including:

• Reliability: “In extraneous load testing, could OutSystems handle 10 million clients? Could it handle 10,000 clients logging in and transacting at the same time? The answer was yes.”
• Enterprise flexibility: “We can rapidly develop and deploy new solutions and easily iterate, meaning we can quickly respond to changing demands from the business."
• Interoperability: “OutSystems can gather data from legacy systems and allow you to integrate that with newer technologies such as intelligent RPA or generative AI. It can really expedite transitioning from older tech to newer tech.”
• Security: “When we evaluated it—and regularly since then—OutSystems has passed our security tests. It has the right security model around it.”
• Governance: “The OutSystems platform’s built-in monitoring gives you a line of sight into any application built on it, including statistics that really help you understand performance.”

KeyBank built five applications in its first six months using OutSystems. It initially built smaller, internal applications for human resources. Then it created a simple time-tracking app that made a big impact: the app serves 3,000+ managers and reduces a process that used to take 5-8 minutes down to 90 seconds.

After that success, it was time to go bigger. “We wanted to see if low-code could do something that could be presented to clients, and at scale,” says Dominic.

In less than nine months, KeyBank used the OutSystems platform to build and roll out a new user experience for unsecured lending, replacing an in-person-only process with mobile and on-prem apps that allow customers to request loans or lines of credit from anywhere. The project reduced credit cycle times by 20%, while proving to Dominic and his team that OutSystems was more than capable of supporting enterprise-scale development and mission-critical apps.

Then the team took on originations—the process of onboarding clients to financial solutions. On average, clients were electing three to four products at a time, so KeyBank wanted to eliminate redundancy in onboarding—with no repeated questions. The bank used OutSystems to quickly develop a user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) orchestration layer with 19 integrations behind the scenes—including with some legacy, homegrown systems that had limited documentation. This project, too, was a success. “Our NPS scores have gone up,” says Dominic, “and we’ve seen our dropout rate go significantly down.”

Results

Quicker development, faster banking

KeyBank now has more than 40 integrations on OutSystems apps and it’s building more every day, propelling the hyperautomation strategy, which in turn is making a major impact on the customer experience and creating differentiation for KeyBank.

In addition to reducing credit cycle times by 20%, the bank has accelerated its investment origination process by 50% and its deposit process by over 30%.

The speed at which his team has delivered these changes, says Dominic, has transformed how KeyBank thinks about possibilities for improvement. “Now the floodgates have opened,” he says. “The business has never interacted with the technology side in this way before. And I love that OutSystems has allowed us to become more agile than we’ve ever been. It’s changed the game in how we produce solutions and applications.”