Anjali Raveendranath, Senior Application Designer for one of the largest home mortgage loan and servicing companies in the U.S., has built her 20-year career by staying ahead of IT innovation. Embracing and integrating advanced technologies in every application, she has tackled a range of business and operational problems for various Fortune 500 companies by designing scalable enterprise solutions specific to the needs of the retail, healthcare, insurance, automotive, and finance industries.
Ms. Raveendranath says she is motivated to push boundaries and use technology in ways that have a transformative impact on people and businesses. In every sector, she has led innovative projects that have added measurable value for diverse stakeholders by improving operational efficiencies and/or reducing costs.
In her current role, her most recent accomplishment is an innovative financial rules engine that enabled her employer to successfully implement significant automation and efficiencies associated with its CARES Act forbearance programs. The federal CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act is an economic stimulus bill passed in in March 2020 to address multiple issues and provide relief to millions of Americans who suffered financial challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic’s broad societal impact. The new rules engine developed by Ms. Raveendranath gave her company greater ability to rehabilitate mortgage loan borrowers, and allowed for redelivery of loans during and following the pandemic. While this directly improved the customer experience, an additional benefit is that since implementing the rules engine product, servicing costs per loan have declined by more than 30%. Furthermore, results of multiple industry surveys have confirmed the company’s position as one of the lowest-cost loan servicers in the residential mortgage industry, due in large part to its utilization of the rules engine product.
Ms. Raveendranath developed the new rules engine as part of a broader initiative in which she was architecting a new loan Servicing Systems Environment. She says, “With the advent of AI and other new tools, our IT team recognized the opportunity to transform the company’s legacy systems to a modernized platform, as part of an enterprise-wide effort to upgrade operations, improve agility, decrease servicing costs, and better meet the evolving needs of the business and its customers.”
Her significant expertise in designing process automation tools with business logic and rules engines provided Ms. Raveendranath with the inspiration and technical ability to create this effective new product. She explains, “Rules serve as the backbone of AI, particularly in rule-based systems, establishing a structured foundation for decision-making and problem-solving. These systems depend on predefined rules, meticulously crafted by developers drawing from expert human knowledge, to analyze input data and yield meaningful outcomes. By encapsulating human expertise within if-then statements, rule-based systems maintain consistency and reliability in their operations. Additionally, the development process entails constructing a comprehensive repository of rules and facts, which are fed into a decision engine. This meticulous approach grants precise control over system behavior, ensuring strict adherence to programmed functions. Thus, rules assume a pivotal role in AI, empowering systems to effectively harness human expertise and deliver accurate results across diverse applications.”
As a Lead Developer who specializes in Java/J2EE and Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, Ms. Raveendranath says that her approach to solving complex business problems has evolved with the development of today’s new technologies. She now designs AI and ML algorithms into each solution at the start, leveraging their capabilities for decision-making, pattern recognition, automating repetitive tasks, personalizing user experiences, and ensuring data integrity accessibility.
She says, “For example, the financial rules engine in the Servicing Systems Environment was built and deployed in a virtual private cloud assigned for the company’s IT infrastructure. Being deployed in the cloud allows rules engines to garner the benefits of scalability, and economizing of resources. Auto-scaling scripts monitor usage and load on the different rules, services, and computing resources, and based on predefined thresholds, trigger scaling up and down of resources—thereby delivering efficiency in usage and costs. The flexibility that a cloud environment offers to quickly spin up new instances or retire unused resources is a major contributing factor to the overall efficiency of the product. Additionally, using an infrastructure managed by one of the leading cloud service providers allows the company to tap into additional resources for data backup and security.”
Ms. Raveendranath believes that her new financial rules engine can model applications for other systems and processes that can benefit both consumers and corporations. “The acceleration of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), and data analytics offers endless possibilities for problem-solving,” she says. “I am continually inspired to explore how these new tools can be deployed to create system and process improvements that are beneficial for businesses, individuals, and society.”
