A Mid-sized Bank Getting To Revenue Faster

There is a movement to bring on customers fast and keeping them coming. Here is another example of how smaller organizations can compete with big organizations. Once a smaller organization lands a client and gives them better service, it's hard to steal that customer away. This is a smart way to use BPM to compete.

                    For more Fractal Images, see http://www.james-sinur.com/

Challenge:

This bank competes with large national banks through superior speed and customer responsiveness. A Senior Operational Officer believed that further-enhancing the external customer experience would require accelerating key internal processes. “After interest rates, the primary thing our customers care about is speed,” he says. “They want to be able to close their home or commercial loan and get their funds as quickly as possible.” He believed BPM-based process improvement was the place to start, but he also wanted to create a more mobile and collaborative Enterprise Social environment. He identified the mortgage processes as a first candidate for improvement due to its core importance to the organization and its current limitations, such as manual hand-offs, paper-based systems, limited process visibility, and lack of consistent and sustained communications. “We wanted BPM for core process improvement. We wanted to be more mobile and use Social technology, but we didn’t have a good implementation plan around it". When they saw social collaboration in business process-centric context, they made the move to BPM.

Loan origination involves a combination of structured automation and unstructured human interaction and collaboration. It also creates volumes of paperwork that must be reviewed, approved and maintained. BPM was selected to improve the efficiency of straight-through processing using the platform’s integrated business rules, alerts, escalations, and more. In addition, the bank believed BPM’s ability to present enterprise data via a simple social interface, within the context of established business processes, would increase the speed and quality of human collaboration and decision making in cases that involved exceptions to standard policies.

The Solution:

The team began building the new Mortgage Loan Origination application using the Cloud. This allowed
the team to jump-start development even as it waited for the provisioning of on-premise hardware and move it behind the fire-wall later. The BPM vendors worksocial platform combines the best of BPM work automation with the most innovative capabilities in Social, Mobile, Cloud and Data technologies. BPM
centralized all  mortgage-related communication, processes and data into one platform that allows loan officers, managers and customers to collaborate together to get work done more quickly. Through automation and flexible business rules, the system eliminated reliance on disparate paper forms,
faxes, emails, and snail mail.

Making all of that power available on an iPad/iPhone, Android or BlackBerry means  the Bank’s loan
officers can interact with customers to initiate, check on, or modify a loan request from anywhere. This interaction is created by dynamic case management with structured automation, leading to better interaction
between loan officer and customer.

The Results:

The bank has seen a host of business benefits from its initial implementation. Chief among these is a 30% acceleration of mortgage loan approvals, which directly impacts the quality of the customer experience. BPM delivered this by eliminating multiple days of work and duplication in the process, automatically enforcing the movement of work to its next step. Other received benefits include full process visibility, increased data quality, less re-work, and decreased training times. The improved loan management system helps the bank achieve its mission critical business objectives by integrating disparate legacy systems, overlaying them with a more flexible, natively-mobile architecture and social interface. Making loan officers mobile with an improved workflow system gives them the tools needed to increase efficiency, while collaborating with customers through a simple, user friendly social interface.

Net; Net: 

BPM can not only accelerate revenue increase, but allow for better relationships. This is a great example of a hybrid process. See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/11/process-styles-headed-to-hybrid.html

This is a highly summarized and anonymous case study based on Appian technology 

See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/10/me-bank-is-taking-on-big-banks-with-bpm.html for another example of using BPM to compete with large competitors.