The power of agile innovation

Laura Daniel, Manager of Operations at The Union Bank Co., saw what many leaders miss: inefficiencies hiding in plain sight. As she walked teams through workflow analyses across the Ohio-based community bank's 18 branches, the reality became clear.

"I was blown away at some of the things that my team was doing that they didn't have to," Daniel said.

Manual processes consumed hours that could be spent on higher-value work. After learning about new workflow automation tools available natively within the Encompass platform, Daniel trusted her operational instinct and took action. Within six months, Union Bank deployed 85 automated tasks and more than 60 automation rules within the Encompass Workflow Engine in production. The team achieved significant efficiency gains by focusing entirely on increasing utilization of native Encompass workflow automation and task-based workflow capabilities. By embracing innovation through increased utilization of Encompass, Daniel transformed how her team operates and reallocated her employees' capacity to other high-value, strategic tasks.

Discovering the platform's potential through ICE product trainings

Daniel's innovation journey started at the 2025 ICE Experience conference, where she saw firsthand the potential value of how an exception-based, task-driven workflow could replace multiple commonly time-consuming lending workflows.

Intrigued, Daniel educated herself on the tools required to enact this workflow by reviewing ICE support resources and training videos and sharing ideas with fellow Encompass Systems Administrators. It became apparent that automation for every workflow in Union Bank's lending process could be configured in Encompass without requiring any custom development work.

"I'm not an advanced coder by any means," Daniel said.

She was delighted to learn she could improve the user experience for her team without extensive technical knowledge or hiring third-party developers.

Analyzing workflows to uncover hidden inefficiencies

The preparation phase proved essential to her success. Taking an inclusive, collaborative, and analytical approach, Daniel met individually with employees in each role to document daily workflows, capturing every manual step and identifying automation opportunities. This ground-up approach surfaced inefficiencies that teams had accepted as normal for years and never questioned.

"I would ask an employee, 'Why are you doing that four times?' And the answer would be, 'Well, that's how I started to do it,'" Daniel said.

The analysis revealed that while there were significant opportunities to radically improve productivity through increased utilization of Encompass tools, it would require teams to change how they operated.

Building the foundation for exception-based workflows

Realizing success hinged on getting buy-in from end users across the organization, Daniel devised an adoption strategy that balanced ambition with pragmatism. Following the information she learned at Experience, Daniel started by configuring the new Encompass tools she knew were essential for an exception-based workflow: the Workflow Engine, Tasks and Encompass' Enhanced Conditions framework. Next, she created updated workflows for all functions, focusing on creating automation rules for any non-essential manual work that could be eliminated, making the remaining manual steps "exceptions."

Laying the groundwork with a strategically chosen starting point

The phased rollout evolved organically out of necessity. Daniel started with closing, where she saw opportunities for quick wins with relatively low effort that would also allow her to test an exception-based workflow on a small scale. Her closer has since fully transitioned to working on the Encompass web interface with automation assisting her workflow and now finds it "easier and faster."

Applying automation to the most time‑consuming workflows

After the initial success with the team's closing workflow, Daniel set her sights on iterating and expanding adoption of Encompass automation tools with other areas of the lending workflow. Based on her initial analysis, she identified automating the ordering of services and conditioning of loans as the next major opportunity to drive efficiencies for her processors. To accomplish this, she adopted Enhanced Conditions, Encompass' new conditions management framework, and leveraged the Encompass Workflow Engine to automate the ordering of services and applying conditions to loans.

In the new and improved workflow, third-party services, including fraud review and flood determinations, are now ordered automatically based on information detected from the loan file. Encompass then ties incoming results to specific conditions and automatically applies them to the loan, eliminating the need for processors to manually search for them in Encompass. For example, when a flood certification indicates a flood zone, the flood insurance condition appears immediately on the loan. Or, if an appraisal is marked subject to completion or repairs, a final inspection condition is added. Similar triggers apply to other mortgage services, eliminating a significant portion of the team's manual steps in what was previously a tedious, time-consuming workflow.

"It's saving them time. It's reducing errors. It's been a pretty big change for our underwriting," Daniel said.

Automatically adding conditions upfront to streamline downstream reviews

Union Bank's approach to conditions automation challenged traditional thinking. Rather than minimizing conditions as many lenders commonly do, they instead leveraged Encompass' tools to automatically add conditions to loans for every single document requiring review. Daniel's team then reviews the loan file and waives conditions that are not applicable.

While this approach may initially appear unconventional, it has been a significant efficiency and quality control process improvement for the team. Previously, underwriters reviewed every document in the Encompass eFolder with a yellow pad, made notes, wrote down conditions, then searched for and added each condition in the conditions tab. This manual workflow consumed time and sometimes led to errors. Daniel bet that asking the team to remove pre-applied conditions would require far less time than searching for conditions in the system and applying them manually one at a time. And she was right.

"We switched our thought process and conditioned for everything from the very beginning. If there's a document that needs to be reviewed in every file, it's an automated condition," Daniel said.

Using dynamic rules to improve accuracy and speed

With the team's new exception-based workflow, Encompass now automatically populates conditions based on loan characteristics. Self-employed borrowers trigger automated conditions for tax returns. Manufactured homes require specific documentation. Condo properties generate condo-specific requirements.

"It's a lot easier to waive something that you don't need than to search through the list of conditions to add them. And things get missed. If we're automating it and you see the condition, you're not missing it," Daniel said.

Underwriters now review conditions once from the conditions tab instead of twice.

"They can review, clear it, waive it, or add another condition if needed, although now our goal is to automate as many conditions as possible, so we don't have to manually add them, which takes more time. It's quicker to waive than to search and add,” Daniel said.

Earlier visibility leads to faster, cleaner files

Although Daniel's primary objective was to increase processing capacity, the new conditions management workflow also delivered benefits for her loan originators by creating transparency into potential issues with a loan much earlier in the process.

"Our loan officers now see all the conditions earlier on. The processors see them ahead of time. We're getting documents back from borrowers more quickly. Documentation is already in the file before the underwriter's first review. So, they're clearing things quickly,” Daniel said.

Daniel's strategic shift has turned potential bottlenecks into workflow accelerators. Loan officers remember requirements they might have forgotten. Processors gather documents proactively. Underwriters receive more complete files. The result is faster cycle times without sacrificing quality.

Daniel's next focus for innovation was her team's initial disclosure workflow, a historically manual, multi-step process. Using the Workflow Engine and Encompass' new web-based disclosure tracking tools, Union Bank automated the generation of initial disclosures once the initial disclosure readiness form is completed.

"It was super easy, simple and slick. We automated them with one click," Daniel said.

This replaced a seven-page, eight-step process, which allowed the team to shift ownership from a disclosure desk team to processors, freeing up team capacity to focus on other more strategic areas of the lending process.

Union Bank's workflow innovation initiative took approximately eight months from start to finish. While the effort to transition her team to using Encompass' latest tools to create exception-based workflows was relatively low effort, the business impact has been significant for Daniel and her team. Notable results include:

Beyond the numbers, the transformation significantly improved loan quality by replacing manual, error‑prone data entry with consistent, system‑driven processes that reduced defects and lowered buy‑back risk when selling loans to investors.

Daniel's transformation journey continues with post-closing workflows.

"I thought our post-closing process before was really pretty simple. We are pretty heavy users of dashboards," Daniel said.

But sitting down with her post-closer revealed the same patterns: three or four different spreadsheets tracking information that could live in Encompass.

"We have plans to revisit the workflows again, do another analysis to measure the results and find ways to make our operations even more efficient with Encompass," Daniel said.

Daniel's focus on continuous improvement is driven by operational reality: mortgage volume can surge overnight when market conditions change.

"We want to be able to do more with the people we have," she said.

Her approach to ongoing refinement reflects the simplicity she has discovered on the platform.

"Every time I find something manual in the lending workflow, I now ask the team, 'Why don't we automate this task or create this rule?' It's really pretty simple to do."

Union Bank's transformation journey began with operational instinct and a clear business objective: improving loan quality, compliance and efficiency by reducing manual data entry. Daniel trusted her gut and acted. It meant building a long-term plan but deploying gradually, testing and following the natural file touch progression.

Her story challenges the notion that transformation requires extensive planning cycles, large budgets, or perfect timing. When you combine operational intuition with the discipline to analyze workflows, build systematically, and measure results, you create conditions where small teams can achieve outsized impact.