- [Presenter] When the COVID-19 pandemic hit,
all industries were forced
to put their infrastructures to the test.
The US government passed the CARES Act,
which included financial support for small businesses
under the Paycheck Protection Program.
This included loans and forgiveness on qualified expenses.
The scope was huge.
More than 5,000 US banks
have processed over $500 billion in loans
since the program began
and over five million borrowers have benefited from it.
The challenge was that as Loan Forgiveness Program evolved,
the eligibility criteria kept changing,
making it difficult to calculate forgiveness levels
and process claims.
Ernst & Young,
one of the world's largest professional services firms,
saw an opportunity to help,
and that's where Microsoft Power Platform comes in.
A fusion team at EY
composed of tech professionals and business experts
was able to build a comprehensive solution
that collected all documents,
performed automatic crosschecks for accuracy,
and assembled a complete loan forgiveness application
in just 12 weeks.
Since deployment of the first prototype,
EY has been able to process over 50,000 loans
totaling more than $10 billion
on behalf of its banking customers.
So how did EY go from prototype to production
and achieve all that in just 12 weeks?
Let's go back to where it all started.
The first step for the fusion team at EY
was to pitch its idea to customers.
They created a working low-code prototype
of the lender application,
which allows lenders to review and process documents
for loan forgiveness.
This prototype helped
to establish instant credibility with clients
and win business.
The team at EY was able to work together in real-time,
dramatically short-circuiting feedback loops
and requirements gathering.
Building an app went from being a single-player experience
to becoming a multi-player collaboration surface
as teams of professionals worked in real time together.
The team didn't have to worry
about the nuts and bolts of making a solution work.
Instead, they could focus more on the flow
and the data elements that they needed,
the UI for the borrower portal,
the whole business side of the solution.
The next step was to create the borrower portal,
the externally-facing website
that provided a unified interface
to manage the loan forgiveness,
check eligibility, provide documentation,
and track progress.
The UI team was not just able
to get amazingly fast delivery times.
As security and privacy are more important than ever,
they built a solution in the most secure way
with robust security and privacy controls built in.
The next challenge for the team
was to make sure that the solution worked seamlessly
with multiple third-party services
using both pre-built and custom connectors.
This is one of the most important aspects of the solution.
The ability to connect with multiple third-party services
is what enabled the tool
to cover the entire application process
and submit a complete loan forgiveness application.
As the project moved forward,
the team needed a way
to better manage the steep increase in inquiries
from thousands of applicants.
The best option was to create a chatbot
that responds to frequently asked questions
related to the Loan Forgiveness Program.
The virtual agent provides instant responses
and information for borrowers
through multi-turn conversations.
One of the areas that used to keep the EY team up at night
was how hard it is to build reliable automations
so that they can just set it and forget it.
Now, in just a few weeks,
they were able to set up a fully automated process
which will allow borrowers
to digitally sign their application,
submit it for review,
and work with the lenders through secured messages and email
to resolve issues.
The original process
made by unstructured emails, instant messages,
and phone calls
that make up the bulk of the loan requests
was completely transformed.
Documents are now automatically scanned
and relevant data is extracted
and crosschecked with loan data.
Additionally, the team quickly built dashboards
displaying real-time metrics,
such as the number of loans processed,
time to process, quality check logs,
and performance reports.
After only 12 weeks,
the team at EY was ready to go to production.
Since then, the tool has also become a model
for other product development efforts at EY.
And there are so much more to unlock
as organizations like EY can unsilo their business data,
provide integrated technical support,
build new data landscape across hybrid sources
with automated data discovery
and sensitive data classification,
and drive new experiences across their organizations.
Our goal is to inspire entire organizations
to participate in digital transformation
and to embrace holistic low-code.
(bright music)