Financial Institutions

The current financial crisis and the responses of financial institutions—capital infusions, portfolio actions, and initial-cost takeouts—have been well documented. But the crisis has done more than destroy value. It has redefined what financial institutions must do to compete and win.

Unfortunately, the environment for financial institutions will continue to become more challenging. We will likely see slower economic growth, depressed property prices, shrinking global-trade volumes, and higher unemployment levels. Financial services environment can be complicated with multiple business units, legacy systems, and dozens of enterprise applications that not only must work together but also give management the business insight necessary to drive timely and accurate decision-making. Customers’ de-risking and deleveraging will further reduce demand for previously high-margin products and services. Governments and regulators will continue to play increasingly activist roles in the sector.

BPM Opportunity

Financial Service providers are increasingly looking to BPM not only as a solution to specific, immediate process improvement objectives, but as a platform that gives them the ability to tackle diverse process improvement initiatives and realize the following benefits:

• Better target and serve your customer.
  Economically streamline the end-to-end client management process and guide employees through decision-making process with dynamic process coaches.
• Enable Straight-Through Processing.
  Business rules in processes can help automate the routing and processing of tasks — often reducing the amount of human intervention needed by over 80%.
• Extend the value and life of core systems.
  Leverage existing applications by reading and posting transactions while introducing more efficient Web-based forms and interfaces.
• Enable collaboration across and beyond the enterprise.
  Automatic work routing and notifications across groups, outside agents, and customers reduces the time, errors and complexity of executing processes.
• Gain real-time visibility and control over processes.
  Managers can view real-time process performance and proactively manage bottlenecks.
• Create an audit trail.
  Detailed process reporting provides complete picture of the process including activities, systems, and participants.