A financial institution engaged in mortgage lending has embarked on a business process improvement initiative to eliminate the activities that hinder growth to ultimately improve the success rate of its mortgage business. As a benchmark for identification, the institution is keen on improving any business process that has less than a 75% success rate. The institution has appointed a business analyst (BA) to review the business transactions for the processes of origination, payments, and closures, as well as identify opportunities for improvements and recommend solutions.
The BA has collected the following information over the last three months pertaining to these business processes:
*All the business processes are at their maximum capacity in terms of the current number of transactions.
*Each business process has a certain number of rejects and the reasons for rejection include documentation, verification, collateral, and funding. Funding rejects occur when the bank's customers have failed to make payment of their mortgage processing fee or mortgage closure payment.
The BA has also recommended the use of documentation checklists as a solution to eliminate the documentation rejects.

If an additional recommendation to reduce Verification Rejects by 50% were to be introduced into the mortgage origination process, what is the potential success rate of the mortgage origination process?
Correct Answer: A
Explanation
The potential success rate of the mortgage origination process can be calculated by subtracting the percentage of total rejects from 100%. The current success rate is 70%, which means the current percentage of total rejects is 30%. If the verification rejects (8.4% of the total transactions) were to be reduced by 50%, there would be only 4.2% verification rejects remaining. This would decrease the percentage of total rejects to (30%
- 4.2%) = 25.8%. Therefore, the potential success rate would be (100% - 25.8%) = 74.2%. However, this answer does not account for the effect of the documentation checklists, which would also reduce the documentation rejects (12.2% of the total transactions). Assuming that the documentation checklists would eliminate all the documentation rejects, the percentage of total rejects would further decrease to (25.8% -
12.2%) = 13.6%. Therefore, the potential success rate would increase to (100% - 13.6%) = 86.4%, which can be rounded to 86%.
References:
CBAP / CCBA Certified Business Analysis Study Guide, 2nd Edition, Chapter 5: Solution Assessment and Validation, p. 211-212 Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) Specialization, Course 4: Business Analysis:
Solution Evaluation, Week 2: Solution Performance Assessment, Video: Solution Performance Metrics Basic Math Operations, Khan Academy