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.

As we have seen in the past, 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 becoming the new preference when it comes to understanding how customers, employees, regulators, and other stakeholders interact with organizations.

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 through the eyes of a journey quickly identify that what had been thought of as a single process is really a whole series of processes and sub-processes chained together to deliver an outcome. Rarely are these process chains pre-planned or designed to work together, and 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, assess opportunities for new automation systems, and remove waste from the processes.

Fintechs do not drive transaction costs down by simply applying traditional incremental improvement techniques. They look at the whole journey, all the processes and ask the questions: “Do we actually need this at all?” or “How can we do without it?” Such thinking can only be done in existing organizations when you have full visibility into the entire end-to-end process. You can’t change what you can’t see.

With that in mind, there are some key recommendations to help streamline the process:

1. Consolidate Solutions
   Audit use of existing process modeling and management tools to identify where consolidation can create a single source of process truth. Consider whether existing tooling provides the complete and connected views of journeys, processes, and mining, and how such information is easily communicated across the organization.
2. 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, and ideally would be populated automatically via process mining. The overriding factor should be that they need to be outcome and not activity focused.
3. Define Accountability
   It is likely not necessary to create yet another center of excellence, but it is important to create a federated group of specialists who will ensure that the needs of all stakeholders are properly represented in a single holistic manner. Employees, customers, compliance teams, and regulators all need confidence in what is being seen and what is being done. That the processes are being done consistently.

By leveraging connected views for a 360-degree visualization and combining that with the ability to analyze vast numbers of historical transactions, it becomes apparent that agile incumbents can undertake sophisticated scenario analysis to predict the likely impacts of change, the pressure points, and the risks and opportunities associated with them. 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 to learn about how financial services organizations can streamline process with capabilities like journey modeling, process mining, and more.