How BPM is Evolving to Help Banks Improve Top-line

Earlier this week, I spoke at IQPC’s Business Process Excellence for Financial Services conference in New York. As a chairperson for the event, I took great pride in bringing together a community of experts and thought leaders to discuss the burgeoning technology issues facing financial institutions. By working together we are able to mitigate operational risk.

In my presentation, How BPM is Evolving to Help You Improve Your Top-line, I discussed the need for banks to respond first, fast and best to their customers and how they can achieve this. Today, institutions must respond to increasing customer demands while meeting costs and requirements associated with regulation. Many banks have shown that they can meet these demands and improve the quality of their operations by using business process management (BPM).  However, these institutions are still trying to conduct business and grow their top line and market share. So how do they do both? By differentiating themselves from other financial institutions and engaging with their customers to offer something different and better.

In my view, there are three goals banks must set out to achieve in order to reach the nirvana of customer engagement:

1.   Respond quickly to regulatory change

2.   Manage risk and compliance

3.   Promote the right offer, at the right time, through the right channel

This requires exploring the next frontier of BPM through solutions that combine BPM with business events, real-time analytics, and business rules.  While the majority of technology investments have historically focused on operation automation, back office processes and cost reduction, the next wave will see a greater focus on situation-aware, customer facing and revenue generating solutions. How can banks achieve a level of customer engagement that will both increase process efficiencies and top-line revenue?

• Respond quickly to regulatory changes. As we’ve seen through Dodd-Frank and Basel III, the pressure is on for banks to conform to these regulations. Through proactive, customer-facing technologies, banks can refine their processes to meet regulatory requirements without having to change them completely. This ultimately saves money and prevents delays and downtime for customers.

• Mitigate risk and manage compliance. By standardizing processes and applying business event and rules capabilities across existing systems, banks can adhere to risk and compliance standards without increasing the cost of IT or ripping and replacing their existing systems. This extends to other challenges banks face including fraud and reputational risks.

• Promote the right offer, at the right time, though the right channel. Ultimately a bank’s task is to better understand a customer’s wants and needs. Through real-time visibility into customer interactions and the use of a rules-based decision support system, they can offer a more customized, situation-aware approach to customers and reach them at the right time through the channel most convenient to them. Customers are more apt to consider new products and services when they can interact with their bank in a personalized way. This ultimately improves customer loyalty while also growing revenue and wallet share.

Every organization should get in shape with “responsive business training” - striving to spend fewer resources solving problems and more time delivering value-add services to customers. This approach is one exercise in the training program – what others are you considering?