Now that I have addressed the context and concept of Process Intelligence, as well as its benefits and application areas in the banking industry, I will finally look into three cases to illustrate its practical use.
Various financial service providers have been using Process Intelligence successfully for management and improvement purposes for a number of years. One global banking group based in Switzerland, for example, uses the technology to manage and optimize its securities services. There are inevitable risks during the execution of these processes. The group measures the value of all outstanding transactions and knows exactly where the transactions are in the process. This serves to gauge operational risk. The financial controller is now able to charge for orders that were cancelled at the customer’s request. Activity-based costing is thus within reach. Manual interventions are identified, which means the bank can see whether it is achieving its STP objectives. Finally, the bank is working hard to improve customer satisfaction and quality control, because it is now absolutely clear which orders are still waiting in the queue.
A leading processor of payment transactions, headquartered in the Netherlands, uses Process Intelligence to check compliance with the service level agreements entered into with its customers regarding completeness, correctness, and timeliness. The transaction processor gives the same customer an insight into the service quality of the end-to-end process chain consisting of payment order, verification/validation, data processing, posting, clearing, and settlement. Internally, the transaction processor uses the measurement data to optimize the cost structure.
A prominent direct insurer in Germany is deploying Process Intelligence to cope with an explosive increase in market demand. This growth, which has taken off enormously since 1994, placed a considerable burden on processes, systems, and organizational structures. To deliver its operational excellence strategy and realize long-term improvements, the insurer embedded process measurement via an improvement method very similar to Six Sigma. Within a year, throughput times were reduced by 50 percent and complaints by 60 percent.
All in all, Process Intelligence is an innovative control mechanism that gives banks new insights – beyond what they learn from traditional tools – into performance improvement and/or risk management. A number of target groups can benefit from this technology, from COOs, CFOs, and CROs to a wide range of professionals involved in performance management, compliance management, and risk management initiatives. Deploying this new technology in their organizations will put financial institutions back in charge at a time of falling markets and fading confidence. The banks, who lead the way here, will gain a competitive advantage and emerge as clear winners when the economy eventually recovers.
If you want to learn more about Process Intelligence, please have a look in the ARIS Expert Paper Library. You will find a range of contributions, including the expert paper ‘Process Intelligence puts the banks back in charge’. Furthermore, IDS Scheer’s references section contains a wide range of case studies, including some of those briefly described in this post.
by Ricardo Passchier
