CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Legacy technology is a barrier to automating commercial lending at banks.

Mainframe systems, in particular, complicate automation, Daniel Seay, Fifth Third Bank’s senior vice president and director of wholesale transformation, said during the “Modernizing Commercial Lending through Automation” session at last week’s Bank Automation Summit.

Modern software development and IT operations (DevOps) can move much faster on deployment than development did on legacy mainframes, he said.

“As we bring the new tools in, and we have the right environments, we have the right DevOps capabilities, and then you’ve got to get linked to an integrated release schedule with one of the mainframes,” Seay said In some cases, the development team can respond with agility and do releases between days, but in situations with mainframes, it can take four months to test the regulatory reporting when a change is made, he added. As a bank starts to automate across its systems, the mainframe can become “your lowest common denominator,” he added.

The $211 billion Fifth Third will pursue an open banking concept as it develops commercial loan automation, Seay said.

“I think that’s the next frontier for us,” he said. “It’s already proven out.”

Leveraging automation for commercial lending

The BAS panel also included Atul Verma, chief information officer of personal and business banking at BMO Financial Group; Chris Gufford, general manager of commercial product at nCino; and Karen Oakland, vice president of industry marketing at Smart Communications.

The panel discussed which products and services their companies are working on to support automating commercial lending.

The $805.9 billion BMO is exploring document artificial intelligence (AI), as well as machine learning, particularly as the technology can enhance fraud prevention, Verma told the audience.

While e-signatures have been around for some time, they continue to be a part of the automation journey for many commercial banks. E-signatures come to light with “almost every conversation we have with a financial institution,” Gufford said, as well as automated spreading, know-your-customer (KYC) concerns and customer onboarding. Customer experience platform Smart Communications has been focusing on e-signatures across processes and omnichannel orchestration, Oakland said.

“We’ve been doing some things in the last year, we call it ‘omnichannel orchestration’ … which is a really big word to just say … ‘I want to orchestrate what the customer’s interaction looks like,” Oakland said.