Choosing the right solution for end-to-end process optimization 

Financial institutions, including banks and insurers, have been undergoing a decades-long digital transformation. After digitizing their back-office operations, they moved on to doing the same with their front-end sales and servicing processes, and now many are focused on the next step in their transformation journey—end-to-end business process optimization. Through digital technology, they can streamline, optimize, and integrate their back- and front-end business processes across the enterprise to improve efficiencies, the customer experience, and more. The question is which solution is best for achieving this?

Take, for example, the process of applying for a mortgage. Without process optimization, borrowers can experience undue stress and uncertainty resulting from issues such as a lack of proactive communication on the status of their applications (e.g., Is the information I’ve provided sufficient? What has been happening with my application for the past two weeks? How much longer will it take for a decision to be made?). Unfortunately, visibility between the submission of an application and the final disbursement can be opaque.
 
A lack of process optimization also can negatively impact employees. Does the bank branch advisor, for example, have a complete and accurate view of the status of a mortgage application? Too often the view is partial, which hinders the advisor’s ability to consult effectively with the borrower. 

What type of solution can drive process optimization across lending and other finance processes? In this blog, I’ll share some insights on the challenges of end-to-end process optimization and the ideal platform for addressing those challenges. 

Dealing with process optimization challenges

Although the overall goal is to drive efficiencies and customer value through process optimization, there are challenges in finding the right solution.

Complexity: Many process digitization platforms, for example, are too complex, which makes their large-scale deployment expensive and difficult. Often, when the first use cases are deployed, more design and redesign work is required to ensure the effective pooling of cross-functional capabilities, such as unified event management and distribution, as well as the coherent coordination of these functions. Pooling and coordination capabilities are essential for optimizing front-back articulation, service-level agreement control, and dynamic file distribution. Above all, both are vital for agilely evolving organizational models, such as moving to a “middle-ization” model (i.e., setting up operations in a middle office, not front or back, to increase efficiencies and direct contact with customers).  
 
Talent: Another challenge is finding the right skills for implementing these complex platforms. Talent often is scarce, and turnover is high. As a result, deployments are frequently limited to a few processes. 

Time-to-market: Further, the business process management and case management engines for these platforms are highly technical and require significant time and effort to implement, resulting in a slow time-to-market.  

What to expect from a process optimization platform

To offset these challenges, financial institutions should look for a single, more simplified, modern platform with the following key attributes: turnkey, and cross-functional. Such a platform can be agilely deployed across all markets and business areas to ensure dynamic end-to-end orchestration. 

A platform with these attributes supports a unified, enterprise-wide approach to process optimization, with a focus on pooling critical functions to overcome silos and drive organizational transformations. Deployment and usage costs are reduced accordingly. Further, the marginal cost of adding new processes is kept low. 

At the same time, the time-to-market to digitize a process is significantly reduced—from a few weeks to a few months, depending on its complexity, with a real capacity for iteration and continuous improvement.
 
This last point is crucial for financial institutions. They manage a wide variety of demands, changes, and products. They also are constantly looking to improve their portfolios of offerings and compete within a restrictive and constantly evolving regulatory framework. 

With a simplified, unified process optimization platform, financial institutions can improve their responsiveness, flexibility, efficiencies, quality, and customer journey. They can more easily and quickly design, develop, and deploy cross-functional services, as well as integrate the offers of new partners. They also can extend their services to third-party distributors. Further, process optimization can be achieved across all a financial institution’s use cases and from digitization to orchestration, including business process management and distribution.

Customers not only benefit from such a platform, but employees as well. Through process optimization, employees waste less time, can access complete and accurate information, have visibility across the entire enterprise, and can more easily share knowledge and expertise. Going back to our mortgage loan example, branch advisors can gain in-depth knowledge of their customers while relying on the specific expertise of back-office teams.

IT departments benefit too. Such a platform can be deployed in a flexible and adaptable way within both private and cloud environments, reducing IT management effort and costs. 

Six months to change everything

With a simplified, unified platform, there is no need for heavy investments or waiting 18 to 24 months for the first returns on investment. In six months, a financial institution can implement the first use cases "from scratch” and see a real contribution of value.

CGI is working with financial institutions and other organizations to deliver end-to-end process optimization. We’ve completed large-scale deployments of our platform, CGI DynamicProcess360, with more than 150 digitized processes orchestrated at the same time. Used across the enterprise, the platform becomes the backbone of banks and a driver of major organizational transformations. 

If you’d like to learn more about end-to-end process optimization and our work in this area, feel free to reach out to me.