Using ILOG JRules, Bank of the West is creating a more efficient loan review and approval process, reducing the time required for credit reviews to one day, and improving regulatory compliance. The new system is also expected to ease credit administrators' workload and reduce operational costs.

Bank of the West, which currently operates more than 700 retail and commercial banking locations in 19 Western and Midwestern states, will use ILOG JRules to automate a paper-based credit review process. Bank of the West will use ILOG BRMS in combination with FileNet's Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions to create a new loan origination system (LOS) that will automate the entire credit review and approval process, including data capture, management of the credit administrators' approval queue and credential assessment. In the new LOS, ILOG's BRMS will drive the credit decision workflow, enabling faster data validation and improved routing accuracy, which will result in quicker processing time and increased customer satisfaction. With ILOG JRules, electronic documents will be instantly routed back and forth between all credit review stakeholders in various departments across local and regional branches. The BRMS-based credit review process will save additional time by enabling new credit application documents to be automatically "pre-filled" using data collected from credit reviews.

"In addition to slashing the time required for a credit review cycle, ILOG JRules will enable us to create a standard, streamlined credit review process that the entire bank will follow," said Lenard East, vice president for Strategic Planning & Administration in Commercial Banking at Bank of the West. "Behind the scenes, the ILOG technology, which is proving to be very intuitive, allows us to create scenarios and evaluate results before putting them into production. This will give us a greater level of control and a higher degree of confidence in the business rules we put in place. Most importantly, ILOG JRules will help provide our credit administrators with timely access to better quality information to ensure an optimal credit review process."