Piramal Capital & Housing Finance leverages Microsoft solutions to cut turnaround times of loans by 30%

Need for an enterprise application to manage underwriting

PCHFL was looking to set up a centralized loan origination and management system. It would serve as a single source of data across - risk, asset monitoring, compliance, investment and operations.

The organization wanted to eliminate manual, cumbersome and paper-based processes. Furthermore, it was looking at integration with fintech players to give an edge to the business, making data-driven decisions for a robust underwriting process. An enterprise application would solve for these challenges, improve efficiency and quality of service. PCHFL turned to Microsoft to build an application through its low-code and easily scalable infrastructure.  

A Loan Origination System to simplify and automate processes

PCHFL leveraged a range of Microsoft services to create a Loan Origination System (LOS) for end-to-end management of loans for its wholesale lending business. The following solutions were deployed for the system:

SharePoint Online and SharePoint Framework (SPFx): SPFx – React JS is the main interaction point for end users to use the LOS. It has helped the organization build a single page application which can be used on desktop and mobile devices, leveraging Fluent UI framework.  

Azure services: The LOS has been developed to handle complex processes using Azure functions and web requirements in a serverless computing environment. Through the app service plan, the company can scale-up its computing needs when required to make optimal use of resources. 

PCHFL’s internal processes use Azure Function for generating large PDF documents, preparing a summary of credit history, integration with external fintech partners, etc. The company leveraged: 

• Azure Key Vault for maintaining confidential data
• Azure Logic Apps to communicate with Azure Key Vault through managed identities for authentication
• Azure Cognitive Services to extract data from documents like scanned images, PDFs using Form OCR tool  

Microsoft Power Platform: PCHFL used the Power Platform services in several ways. Power Automate was used to create an end-to-end approval process for various pre-sanction and post-sanction activities with complex orchestration of credit-policy driven approvals. Power Automate was used to integrate with Salesforce CRM to seamlessly pass event-based data from LOS to the CRM. The Microsoft solution also helps execute routine tasks like setting up access control, periodic clean-up of data repositories and event-based email intimations.

Power Apps was deployed to build a mobile app to allow users to click pictures and store them directly in the LOS application repository (OneDrive).

Leveraging Power BI, PCHFL built dashboards on data-centric information pertaining to financials, budgets and sales data of sanctioned loans. These dashboards are tightly integrated with the company’s application allowing users to seamlessly get a personalized view on a single click.

OneDrive: The LOS hosts a platform to store a large number of documents pertaining to every loan. The organization is managing its Document Management System using the SPO document library and its seamless integration with OneDrive. Using Power Automate, the system sets up access control on the document library as per the defined policies.

Microsoft 365: LOS is integrated with Outlook, enabling users to take the benefit of email approval triggered from Power Automate without getting into the application, scheduling appointments, etc. During the approval process, users leverage the capabilities of Online Excel and Word to tag other users, seeks comments, and perform reviews.

PCHFL’s stakeholders use Azure DevOps to manage stories following Agile Scrum. The company maintains its code base in Azure Repos and have set up stringent policies, code analysis to adhere to the governance process. Using Pipelines and Releases the company has fully automated the deployment of Azure Functions, Web Jobs and SPFx solutions, eliminating manual processes and thereby improving the overall release TAT by 20%.

LOS has brought a range of significant benefits to the operations of PCHFL. The application:

• Helped manage pre-sanction operations for a book size of INR 500 billion at its peak. 
• Streamlined operational activities
• Eliminated redundant activities 
• Improved turnaround time for overall sanctioning and certain specific activities of deals like CIBIL data pull, Exposure PPT, PAN verification, etc. by at least 30% across the loan life cycle
• Eliminated duplicate data and documents, thereby saving storage space
• Centralized reports and dashboards
• Simplified the process of regulatory compliance
• Enabled the ability to easily integrate with external fintech players

With improved turnaround time, the business can now take credit decisions faster while ensuring adherence to required compliance requirements. Moreover, PCHFL can capture relevant data points and push them to the data warehouse. Using this information, the company can perform predictive analysis with Azure AI and ML capabilities.