Project executed by the Akaen team.
This case brings together four automation projects deployed in the mortgage back-office of a leading IBEX 35 bank. They shared a gap between the core banking system and an external management platform that turned the operations team into “human middleware”, spending thousands of minutes daily on repetitive tasks while notarial signing SLAs remained urgent.
We tackled the four highest-impact bottlenecks in parallel, combining RPA for legacy systems with API integrations where the architecture allowed them. The result: 24/7 operations, capacity equivalent to 9 full-time roles freed up and over €390K in estimated annual savings.
Executive summary
About the customer
A top-five Spanish bank with a mortgage back-office handling more than 1,500 administrative transactions daily: preparing payment instruments, issuing certificates, updating systems and reconciling financial records. With a varied technology environment, the goal was clear: speed, traceability and smooth execution of these critical processes.
The Challenge: Four Fronts, One Bottleneck
The core banking system did not integrate natively with the external management platform. The team had to intervene manually in every operation: preparing payment instruments before notarial signings, issuing loan cancellation certificates, updating interest overnight and reconciling hundreds of invoices each afternoon. The opportunity cost was unsustainable: senior people were tied up in administrative checks rather than higher-value work.
The Solution: Hybrid Automation RPA + API (24/7)
At AKAEN, we deployed a non-intrusive hybrid automation strategy with two operating modes:
- Real time (daytime): For urgent processes with immediate interaction and response in minutes.
- Overnight batch processing: For bulk processing and reconciliations, with no human intervention.
The 4 Projects in Detail
Each project addressed a specific source of friction. Click any project for full details:
1. Payment instrument coordination (signings)Intelligent prioritisation to ensure cheques and OMF transfers are ready before each notarial signing.
The Problem: A critical risk of attending a notarial signing without issued cheques or OMF transfers. Manually prioritising urgent emails caused delays and waiting at the notary’s office, directly affecting the end customer.
Transformation: Intelligent prioritisation based on signing time. The system automatically orders transactions by urgency and ensures payment instruments are issued in advance.
2. Cancellations and Zero DebtEnd-to-end robotic execution: Host validation and automatic issuance of certificates.
The Problem: Intensive administrative task (10 min/operation) requiring manual validation in Host and individual issuance of cancellation certificates. Daily volume turned this process into a constant bottleneck.
Transformation: Full robotic execution with automatic cross-validation. The robot accesses the host system, verifies the debt status and issues the certificate without human intervention except for exceptions.
3. Interest updates across systems100% unattended overnight batch processing: data ready at 8:00 am for the whole branch network.
The Problem: A critical early-morning process depended on manual intervention. Any failure delayed daily operations across the branch network, affecting customer service from the start of the day.
Transformation: Migration to fully unattended overnight batch processing. The system calculates and updates interest autonomously, with retries and alerts when issues occur.
4. Financial reconciliationAutomatic reconciliation of more than 500 daily invoices from notaries and registries.
The Problem: Manual matching of invoices from notaries and registries, exceeding 500 transactions daily. It occupied the team’s entire afternoon and was prone to allocation errors.
Transformation: Bulk afternoon reconciliation using amount-matching algorithms. The system cross-checks invoices against recorded transactions and escalates only unmatched exceptions to the team.
The Impact
The joint implementation of the four projects not only resolved operational urgency, but also transformed the department's cost structure:
- Capacity Freed Up: Capacity equivalent to ~9 full-time roles reassigned to oversight and business tasks, removing 3,750 minutes of manual work each day.
- Economic efficiency: Over €390,000 in estimated annual savings on direct operating costs.
- Scalability: The system allows business volume to double while keeping operating costs flat.
- Risk mitigation: Drastic reduction of human errors in critical financial amounts.
Operational results
- Stronger SLA performance: critical deadlines under control, with less reliance on manual tasks.
- Data quality: reduction of errors in validations and reconciliations.
- 24/7 continuity: stable operation across daytime and overnight workloads.
Conclusion
Real mortgage efficiency is not achieved by working faster, but by working smarter. By integrating legacy systems with modern automation, we have turned a cost centre into a scalable competitive advantage.
Ready to scale your operations?