CIO Chris Ortega automates Lake Michigan Credit Union

Processing mortgage applications at pace is important for financial service providers. Media outlets are awash with listicles telling US homebuyers who the fastest mortgage providers are. Losing out on those customers is costly. Getting a mortgage application wrong is risky.

Automation provides a way to be both fast and accurate. CIO of Lake Michigan Credit Union (LMCU) Chris Ortega describes how automation technology, centers of excellence, the culture of the credit union, and a vendor partnership approach are delivering accurate speed.

Lake Michigan Credit Union began life as a specialist financial services provider for teachers. Today, the organization is the major credit union for western Michigan, and is expanding in the eastern part of the state as well as Florida. Despite a distance of over 2300 kilometres, the Sunshine State is home to many from Michigan in their retirement, and they want to continue their membership with LMCU. Ortega adds:

We have a presence in Sarasota and Fort Myers, and we are expanding into Tampa, as there is a lot of opportunity for us.

Central to the growth of LMCU is its focus on equal housing lending. Ortega explains this important aspect to the culture and strategy of the organization:

It is a way to level the playing field for anybody that wants to get a home. Institutions like us want to make people feel supported.

Automation for the people

Modernizing mortgage processing not only improves business operations but also the chances of those customers securing the home they want. LMCU is no different from other financial services providers in finding loan processing to be complex, due to the high levels of information required, which Ortega describes as a laundry list:

Organizations need to make sure that you are a good credit risk, so underwriters ask for crazy amounts of information, and to process all of that requires a lot of people, and it extends the length of time.

LMCU has been using robotic process automation and is experimenting with generative AI to automate these processes. As Ortega says:

Some of the information is standardized, so RPA can ensure the information is there and do that really quickly.

An RPA deployment has reduced loan processing time from 55 hours to 10, and coped with a 15% increase in the number of loan applications it handles. The CIO also sees potential for AI to begin making some of the loan application decision-making, for example, auto-approving certain decisions based on the rules of LMCU. None of this, the CIO says, is to the detriment of their staff:

When technology solves something, it releases you to do something else. We look for the person to grow and incorporate agentic AI into their workflow. I’m a Star Trek AI guy, not a Terminator AI guy.

He believes the culture and approach of his organization will enable staff to boldly go where no credit union staff have gone before through their use of AI. He does not want to see them fear the machine. He says:

We want to do more programs, create more financial wellness, and make sure that people are supported, so any time that we can bring technology into practice, we will look into it.

Ortega has invested in RPA and delivered real business benefits.

RPA still has a lot to offer organizations. It is about creating a toolbox of what is best to achieve a business task. When you take end-to-end business processes, some of that simply needs RPA. It is less expensive, and it can take a menial task and automate it.

When you get into things that require a human to make a decision that is based on wider parameters and fuzzy logic, that is when we can look at agentic.

LMCU has just completed its first proof of concept (POC) for agentic AI in mortgage processing.

To ensure LMCU embraces automation across the organization, the CIO has also created a center of excellence for emerging technology.

Partnership

Both the RPA and AI deployments were done in partnership with UIpath. For Ortega, the selection of an automation technology is as much about the culture of the provider as their technology, so the culture of the vendor has to match that of his organization. LMCU already had a small UIpath deployment, and Ortega had worked with the firm in a previous role. He says of working with them:

They are an organization that cares, and they are very interested in how we grow, and therefore very good at helping with the integration of their platform across LMCU.

Ortega says this is vital for today’s CIO, who is often introducing technologies and partners to business lines and needs to be assured that the provider and the business line will form a good partnership. He says:

I am bringing people in from these different vendors to interact with the business and to learn what their needs are. So, a vendor relationship is no longer transactional; it is about relationship building, and I expect our partners to meet that level. It has been a shake-up for some vendors.

He believes there are tech firms that have not given their best to the sector, and mistake credit unions’ friendliness with a view that they will not hold a vendor to task, but he says that is far from the case.

LMCU worked with a partner, Canada’s Greenlight, who helped shape the RPA integration to their enterprise architecture. Alongside UIpath, LMCU has strong partnerships with Microsoft and Cisco, and the CIO is now developing a data analytics team.

My take

The needs of the workload must always direct the technology selection and the business process modernization. Shoehorning any technology, and especially one as cloud-compute consumption-heavy as agentic AI, will not deliver business benefits. Ortega’s clarity on the right tools for the right business requirements is right on the money.