Industry Solutions: Banking

Retail financial services companies face a growing number of challenges to their business. Risk, compliance, consolidation and fraud, increasingly feature alongside the perennial pressure to cut costs, retain customers and increase revenues.

According to a recent survey amongst leading financial services executives, only 12% think that their firms are effective at capitalising on new technologies, even though 39% believe that this is a key attribute. In fact most believe that to remain competitive, costs will need to be reduced by an additional 20% from where they are today.*

Clearly, retail financial services companies will need to take radical action. Lower costs and margins will need to be married with better customer service. Investment in IT must be shown to have a ‘real’ return on investment for the business.

*Source IBM forecasts ‘new world order for financial services’ survey April 2009.

AWD Process Management

Financial service organisations have traditionally grown organically and by acquisition. In many cases, little regard has been given to the quality of the processes that are used to manage work and customers. Additionally, as these companies expand the products and services they offer, they often become segmented in terms of both IT and operation.

By taking an holistic view of how organisations process work and how they service their customers, large amounts of inefficiency and duplication can be eliminated. To do this effectively however, it is necessary to invest in the right tools and solutions. Many large scale companies have had for some time an SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) initiative to reduce the complexity and cost of the IT function. What these organisations often do not realise is that these programmes, mainly considered technology focused, are actually a way of solving some of the key business issues described above.

By implementing a process management solution, alongside initiatives to automate or orchestrate tasks where human beings add no value, savings in operational costs can be achieved.

Some examples from clients of results achieved with DST Global Solutions process management include:

• Reduced the cost of handling claims by 35% over a 2-3 year period.
• 42% reduction in FTE headcount.
• Processed over 250,000 work items per quarter, with 86% of these items being successfully completed with no user intervention.
• One client staff member was able to handle 5000 policies compared to the industry norm of 450.

The AWD Solution

AWD is a comprehensive process management solution that is used by many Tier 1 financial services organisations around the world. A distinctive feature of AWD is that it manages processes in a two dimensional manner. Firstly by handling the horizontal routing, prioritisation and measurement of work between human knowledge workers and then at each key stage in the process by managing the vertical set of tasks that have to be completed, either by the knowledge worker or as a totally automated step.

By combining these two distinct mechanisms in a collaborative manner, processes can be re-engineered to be much more efficient and the activities that do not need human intervention can be fully automated.

Another important advantage of AWD is that all of the configuration work can be performed using graphical tools which allow business users to design and execute the processes.

The basis for ‘shared services’

By implementing process automation in a consistent way across the organisation, business ‘silos’ can realistically consolidate the ‘same’ processes from the enterprise into centralised or ‘shared’ services. The control and planning of processes across multiple product or service lines is achievable. ‘Lifting and shifting’ process capacity in response to market demand can also be achieved. Coupled with that, costs can be driven even lower by off-shoring or outsourcing much of the ‘back office’ activity, whilst still maintaining visibility of work-in-progress.

AWD is designed to assist retail banking organisations to address a number of the business issues they face. These include:-

• Reducing the cost of processing work whilst improving the quality of customer service (eg card issuance, unsecured lending, mortgage applications).

• Supporting compliance and quality against both regulatory and internal mandates (eg FSA reporting and SLAs, Treating Customers Fairly Initiatives).

• Delivering a more agile organisation, capable of launching new products and services faster, and responding quicker to changing demand from the market (eg. flexible acquisition processes, location independent processing).

Related Products

• AWD

  To succeed in today’s corporate business environment organisations must harness the right resources and technology to deliver optimised process efficiency, quality and customer service.