Allied Irish Bank Digitises the Car Finance Process with DocuSign

Major retail bank implements DocuSign to create a fully paperless finance application process, allowing for quicker approvals

Allied Irish Bank has accelerated the often protracted process of purchasing car finance with the implementation of DocuSign’s eSignature solution. The deployment, which is being rolled out across 290 dealerships across the Republic of Ireland, allows intermediaries to sell car finance directly from the forecourt, removing the time-consuming and laborious process of faxing documents back and forth from the bank.

If a customer wishes to apply for car finance, the car dealer inputs the details of their credit application into AIB’s ePortal, which returns a decision almost immediately on whether the customer has been approved or not. Capturing the electronic signature on the credit agreement via DocuSign is initiated at the end of the credit process when the customer collects the car, facilitating much quicker payment to the Dealer.

DocuSign has been integrated into AIB’s ePortal through its API, which takes the process of applying for credit fully digital, right through to approval and purchase. This not only increases the speed of processing deals, saving employees’ time, it also increases the likelihood that a customer will follow through with the purchase.

“We chose to digitise the car finance process because it was extremely manual, which meant it was very hard for us to grow the business,” commented Mary Hunt, Head of Personal & Business Credit Process Re-Invention at AIB. “A key challenge was the fact that the transaction wasn’t taking place on AIB premises and it wasn’t taking place through one of our authenticated channels; it was happening in a third-party location. As part of the digitisation process, we had to figure out how we were going to capture the signature as I was very keen to remove the paper aspect, so that’s how I came upon incorporating DocuSign eSignature into the process.”

“Prior to DocuSign, we were faxing documents to the dealerships. The customer would put a wet signature on the documents and the Dealer would fax them back to us. We would then have to wait for the original document to come back as well to close the case so it was very laborious and time- consuming. We wanted to create a paperless straight-through process, so DocuSign certainly solves the challenge we had with our documentation.”

AIB now plans to extend its use of DocuSign to other departments for new use cases, in areas such as Procurement and HR. As Hunt puts it, “As an organisation, there’s massive potential in terms of the number of paper-based processes that could benefit from eSignature, so that’s where we’re going next. This will form part of a lot of other customer journeys as we continue to re-engineer and digitise to achieve our paperless vision.”