3 Ways to Streamline Process for Financial Services
Using the complete capabilities of an enhanced BPM toolkit, including journey modeling and process mining, enables financial institutions to benefit from continuous improvement, transforming process into a competitive advantage.
It is no longer enough for financial services to rely on traditional process modeling and process models. To rival the customer focus of fintechs requires a shift in thinking. Journeys are the new preference when it comes to understanding. They want a better way to understand how customers, employees, regulators, and other stakeholders interact with organizations.
Identifying Ways to Improve
The “outside-in” approach enables organizations to quickly identify areas of friction, areas of opportunity, and causes of frustration and delight. Banks that look at the process of lending quickly identify a single process is actually a whole series of processes. Rarely are these process chains pre-planned or designed to work together. In many cases, the parts work against each other, much to the frustration of customers.
When journey maps or models are connected with process maps or models, it becomes easier to remove friction, simplify processes, and ensure greater consistency and clarification of outcomes for the customer or employee.
When such models are connected to operational systems via process mining technology, a complete monitoring and improvement system takes shape. By taking this multi-model approach, it becomes easier to identify risks and opportunities. It also helps assess opportunities for new automation systems and remove waste from the processes.
Asking the Right Questions
Fintechs do not drive transaction costs down by simply applying traditional incremental improvement techniques. They look at the whole journey and the processes. They ask the questions:
“Do we actually need this at all?”
“How can we do without it?”
Such thinking happens in existing organizations when you have full visibility into the entire end-to-end process. You can’t change what you can’t see.
Ways to Improve the Process
With that in mind, there are some key recommendations to help streamline the process:
- Consolidate Solutions
Audit use of existing process modeling and management tools. Identify where consolidation can create a single source of process truth. Consider whether existing tooling provides complete and connected views. This includes journeys, processes, and mining, and how such information is easily communicated across the organization. - Measure Your Measurements
Evaluate current KPIs and assess whether they are sufficiently outcome and customer-centric. Where they are not, consider removing them and replacing them with new and more relevant KPIs. These KPIs should be visible and shared via process and journey models. Ideally, this process is populated automatically via process mining. The overriding factor should be that they need to be outcome and not activity-focused. - Define Accountability
It isn’t necessary to create another center of excellence but it’s important to create a group of specialists. This ensures the needs of stakeholders are represented. Employees, customers, compliance teams, and regulators all need confidence in the processes.
Experience Continuous Improvement
By leveraging a 360-degree visualization by analyzing historical transactions, incumbents can use scenario analysis to predict the likelihood of change. They also predict the pressure points and the associated risks and opportunities. Using the complete capabilities of an enhanced BPM toolkit enables financial institutions to benefit from continuous improvement.
For more information, access the white paper Financial Services Organizations Need to Rethink Their Approach to Business Process Management. Learn about how financial services organizations can streamline process with capabilities like journey modeling, process mining, and more.