Commercial Lending Process Automation at Bank Dhofar

Bank Dhofar

As one of the largest* and fastest-growing banks in Oman, Bank Dhofar has been on a relentless pursuit to be ‘The Best Bank in the Gulf’. With a strong commitment to consistency and growth, the bank has made its presence felt in Corporate Banking, Consumer Banking, Treasury, and Project Finance. The bank continues to provide unmatched services to its customers and in addition to traditional banking services also provides electronic banking services such as Internet banking, Phone Banking, SMS banking, cash deposit, and payment machines.

Catering to the Credit Market

Given the rapid pace of development seen in the Gulf region, Commercial Lending is seen an area of focus for Bank Dhofar. While lending activities was at its prime, the bank witnessed increasing volumes of requests and the inherent complexity of processing commercial loans led to higher TAT.

The CITO, Dr. Tariq Taha took on the challenge to improve the output of the Corporate Credit Department which was facing various operational issues, without compromising on the best-in-class security measures and the quality of services.
Being a data-intensive department it faced several challenges in managing large volumes of documents flowing in from multiple sources. The problems were further compounded by the existing manual processes that added to the challenge. Dependency on multiple disparate and sometimes incompatible systems, each performing a specialized function, also added to the complexity.

Implementation Impact

The new system has helped Bank Dhofar gain a competitive advantage by ensuring significant cost savings for the bank while improving productivity by increasing the volume of applications processed daily with minimal errors.

The solution provides a single unified interface to collect information across all applications resulting in a reduction in processing time, the effort involved, and probability of errors. The bank now has a streamlined process for corporate loans, responds faster to credit requests, reduced its operational expenses, controls risks and loan defaults, reduced the TAT of the end-to-end lending process from initiation to sanction, and store critical information at a central level.