Regional Investment Corporation insources loan management, contact centre

Regional Investment Corporation (RIC), a government lender to farm businesses, has completed a project to insource lending and contact centre operations from Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

The insourcing project has seen RIC set up new in-house core banking systems, as well as a contact centre.

Since its inception in mid-2018, RIC had outsourced these functions to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank; however a decision was made to bring them in-house in the lead-up to the FY22-23 financial year, according to the corporation’s most recent annual report.

“Our board made the decision to insource the full suite of lending management services from application to settlement, including all ongoing customer and loan portfolio management,” RIC said.

“This decision was aimed at enhancing the customer experience and delivering excellence in concessional lending that has a positive impact on Australian agriculture and regional communities.”

The selected core banking system is Infosys’ Finacle digital lending solution suite, operating “in a SaaS mode running on AWS”, Infosys said in a statement late last month.

Deployment and configuration were completed in nine months; the system is anticipated to reduce operating costs, enable RIC to meet government mandates faster, and offer more self-service features to loan recipients.

iTnews understands RIC will soon be launching a customer portal enabled by Finacle that will allow customers to view statements and transactions at any time.

Finacle is now managing all account balances, interest charges, payments, disbursements and discharges. It also connects into RIC’s existing Salesforce system which has undergone additional development to act as the corporation’s primary CRM and origination platform.

In addition, the corporation has set up a contact centre that uses Australian cloud-based call centre software ipSCAPE that was implemented by Ethan Group.

The systems were in place in July 2023 to coincide with the conclusion of the outsourcing arrangement.

However, details of the extensive project have only been revealed recently.

A RIC spokesperson told iTnews that the corporation “has implemented many changes over the past few years to improve its customer experience which has led to increased customer satisfaction and faster decision times including online application forms, more streamlined processes, and fewer hand-off points.”

“The Finacle-based platform is one of these improvements which has fundamentally changed RIC’s business operating model to a full-service lender with end-to-end customer experience delivered in-house through fully insourced systems,” the spokesperson said.

Its executive director of transformation Chris Rawlins said in a separate statement that the insourced capabilities would help the organisation achieve its mission - “to nurture the growth of the Australian farm businesses through affordable loans, while also ensuring their resilience and profitability.”

In the corporation’s annual report, it said that once the Infosys and ipSCAPE systems were selected, the organisation “undertook system development against user requirements, system build, functional testing and ensuring integrations to maximise automation.” 

“In support of the new technology, a workforce plan was designed to build structures and capabilities to maximise outcomes from the technology uplift.”