The Challenge

Trez Capital is one of the largest non-bank commercial lenders in Canada who offer private and institutional investors opportunities to participate in high yield mortgage investment funds and individually managed portfolios. Trez Capital provides innovative, short-term financing to commercial real estate developers. Trez Capital engaged Propel solutions to conduct a two-week analysis of its Underwriting, Loan Administration and Funding, Fund Accounting, and Investor Services processes to identify opportunities to support future growth of the organization.

The Objective

  • Process Review: Propel conducted a review of the current processes to determine opportunities for improving the capacity throughout the departments. This was done through interviewing staff, observing work practices, and creating detailed process maps that were critiqued by managers and staff. The resulting “as-is analysis” was used to identify opportunities for process improvements.
  • Financial Analysis: A Profit Driver Model was developed to demonstrate the linkages between the cost and revenue drivers of the organization. Using this model, the total cost per Loan in Underwriting and Loan Administration was analyzed as well as cost per Fund in Fund Accounting, and cost per Investor in Investor Services. From here the impact of changing the organizational targets can be modelled to help determine specific improvement objectives in terms of financial and capacity improvement.
  • Management Toolkit Analysis: Propel conducted a review of the tools Managers in the department use to manage processes in their area including Business Strategy, Forecasting, Planning, Execution Control, and Reports. From this analysis, Propel was able to identify missing tools that should be developed in order to increase visibility throughout the areas.

The Result

Staff engagement throughout the Propel Analysis was high with over 60 opportunities for improvement identified.  The Business Process Analysis provided Trez Capital with baseline measures of their current state and identified the opportunity to introduce a Management Toolkit to improve the management of key processes, leverage systems to improve reporting, and increase visibility through daily and weekly reporting of results and Key Performance Indicators. Propel determined that through a comprehensive Business Process Review, Trez Capital could improve the capacity of the departments through introducing process changes, with an anticipated reduction of 20% of the non value-added time in the processes.