Banking Ops2024–2025

ACE Platform

RPA-to-API migration, 99.98% processing time reduction

Product ManagementAgileAPI ArchitectureRPA

The ACE (Amazing Customer Experience) web application is CIMB's internal platform for managing the commercial lending process, from lead management to SME loan submission. I led Wave 5 of the project, eliminating the existing RPA bot by building a direct API and manually mapping over 300 fields between ACE and BCS. Submission time dropped from 1.5 days to 22 seconds, a 99.98% reduction, enabling same-day loan processing across CIMB's commercial banking network.

ACE (Amazing Customer Experience) is CIMB's internal web application for the Commercial Lending journey, giving Relationship Managers a single platform to manage leads, screen creditworthiness, collect documents, and submit SME loan applications digitally. What started as a branch-replacing tool evolved over five waves into a fully integrated lending platform.

I joined on Wave 5, the most technically intensive phase. The mission was to rip out the RPA layer sitting between ACE and BCS (CIMB's core Loan Origination System) and replace it with a direct API integration.

RPA, at its core, is software that mimics human actions on a screen. It clicks, copies, and pastes data between systems the way a person would. For Wave 3, when BCS didn't expose a clean integration point, it was the right pragmatic call. But RPA is inherently fragile: a single screen layout change or unexpected field format is enough to break the entire submission chain. In practice, submissions took 1.5 days to reach the credit team, making same-day loan processing effectively impossible.

Wave 5 fixed that at the root. By building a direct API integration between ACE and BCS, we eliminated the bot chain entirely. But to do that, every single field in ACE's application forms had to be mapped to its corresponding field in BCS (the right format, the right sequence, the right validation logic). That was over 300 fields. I owned every one of them.

The result: submission time dropped from 1.5 days to 22 seconds. A 99.98% reduction. Same-day loan processing became the new default for Relationship Managers across CIMB's commercial banking network.

It was my first project at CIMB. It remains one of the most operationally impactful things I've shipped.

Reduced submission time from 1.5 days to 22 seconds (99.98% reduction)
API migration from RPA with 300+ field mappings across BCS
Enabled same-day loan processing for branch operations
RESTful API architecture with ASP.NET Core

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What is ACE?

ACE (Amazing Customer Experience) is CIMB's proprietary internal web application for the Commercial Lending journey. It exists to solve a problem that every large bank quietly struggles with: SME loan applications are document-heavy, compliance-intensive, and traditionally required an RM to physically collect paperwork, submit it at a branch, and wait for a back-office team to key everything into the core banking system by hand.

ACE digitises this entire journey. It gives Relationship Managers a single platform to manage leads, screen creditworthiness, collect e-consent, build the customer application, upload documents, complete KYC, and submit everything to BCS, the core Loan Origination System.

Five Waves. One Goal.

ACE didn't arrive fully formed. It was built wave by wave:

Wave 1 laid the foundation: an RM interface, new-to-bank lead capture, and basic pre-screening.
Wave 2 digitised the customer application and credit proposal end-to-end.
Wave 3 achieved a complete digital journey covering all lead types, introducing OCR and RPA to handle document processing and BCS data entry.
Wave 4 refined customer experience, enhanced collateral and review modules, and introduced a CMS for product maintenance.
Wave 5 (where I joined) was different: less customer-facing, more architectural. And arguably the most operationally consequential wave of them all.

The RPA Problem: A Workaround, Not a Solution

RPA bots click buttons, copy data, and fill forms exactly like an employee would. For Wave 3, when BCS didn't expose a clean API, RPA was the right pragmatic bridge. But RPA at scale has a fundamental fragility: these bots break when screen layouts change or when data appears in unexpected formats. In a banking environment, where BCS screens change with every system upgrade and loan applications involve hundreds of fields, that fragility compounds fast.

In practice, the ACE RPA process ran across four sequential steps: creating the application in BCS, uploading documents, uploading financial statements from OCR processing, and transferring the portfolio back from the RPA bot ID to the actual RM. Each step was a handoff. Each handoff was a failure point. The combined wall-clock time: 1.5 days.

300+ Fields, One Direct Line

Wave 5 replaced the entire RPA chain with a direct API integration. BCS is a complex, deeply layered system built to handle the full lifecycle of a commercial loan. Getting data from ACE into BCS via API meant mapping every single field in ACE's application forms to its corresponding field in BCS, in the right format, at the right point in the submission sequence. Over 300 fields.

Each field had to be understood at a functional level: what it means in the lending context, what BCS expects, how it relates to adjacent fields, what happens if it's null or malformed. This wasn't a mapping exercise a developer could complete from a data dictionary alone. I owned that mapping. Every field. Every edge case. Every validation rule.

Architecture

ACE is a microservices application with three distinct frontend portals (RM-facing, administration, and operations) backed by a suite of Java Spring Boot microservices hosted on CIMB's private cloud. Wave 5's change was specifically at the integration boundary: replacing the RPA process with a direct, synchronous API call that populates everything automatically on submission. No bot. No queue. No waiting.

Impact

A 99.98% reduction in processing time. 300+ field mappings owned and delivered. And a foundation that made every subsequent ACE feature faster and more reliable. Sometimes the most impactful product work is the work no customer ever sees.

ACE Platform

Key Highlights

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