Process Intelligence for Banking and Financial Services

Banks and other financial services companies are facing stiff competitive pressures to do more with the growing availability of data to increase growth and profitability. By leveraging digital transformation to lower costs, improve efficiency, deliver a better customer experience, support risk, and regulatory compliance priorities, financial institutions can be in a better position to build out successful business strategies.

Automating common business processes to minimize human interaction is one way that banks can do more faster with current human resources. To automate a process, companies need to have a highly detailed understanding of the process steps, down to each click and menu selection.

But many financial services companies are using manual measurements to gather information about processes. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t uncover enough detail to make informed decisions about how to optimize or automate a process. Businesses often end up automating processes that may not have the expected impact on the bottom line.

Business processes are changing too quickly to track manually. It can be hard for management to know how processes will play out in the real world, putting them at a disadvantage when trying to understand a process well enough to automate it. Functionality ends up being replicated in multiple systems, process flows become disjointed and split, and the experience suffers. There’s usually a lot of hidden detail to uncover. The automation devil is in these details.

Getting to process automation requires an automated method to gather deep insight into how processes actually work.

Benefits of Process Intelligence for Banking

Process intelligence, which we introduced in a previous blog, combines task mining with process mining to analyze existing process data, giving businesses more insight into how processes are performed in the real world and how processes can be optimized for efficiency. Process intelligence helps businesses identify which processes are optimal candidates for automation, with the ability to project the ROI from an automation initiative before you start work.

By identifying the processes that will deliver an ROI when automated, financial services companies can make real headway on significantly improving efficiency to cut operational costs and improving the customer experience to attract and retain quality customers.

In addition, process intelligence can help financial institutions predict outcomes at critical decision points in a process and identify trends and continually improve processes over time. Process intelligence gives you real-time visibility into processes and results and provides end-to-end transparency across systems and departments.

Process intelligence can uncover insight into operating costs and inefficient patterns, and accurately track process KPIs to help cut operational costs and reduce the time to value for customers. For example, significantly cutting the time it takes to approve a loan and disperse funds.

If you’re spot-checking for compliance manually, there’s a lot that can get overlooked. Often, compliance issues are discovered when it’s too late to fix them, which can lead to costly fines and penalties.

Having real-time visibility into processes also enables financial institutions to ensure that employees are consistently following company and regulatory compliance standards. You can even get alerts when a process is out of conformance. This can help reduce the high cost of mistakes that could otherwise go unnoticed.

Common Use Cases for Process Intelligence in Banking

There are several use cases for process intelligence in financial services, any of which could provide a measurable benefit when automated.

Credit Application and Loan Processing

Credit application processes often involve several manual interventions and suffer from bottlenecks. By fully discovering, visualizing, and analyzing the process end to end, you can modernize it for efficiency, accuracy, and improved customer service. Process intelligence gives you the data you need to automate the process, reducing the time required to make a credit decision and deliver a loan or credit card to the customer.

Optimizing the Customer Experience

Process intelligence surfaces the data you need to analyze the customer journey and modernize it. Providing the insight needed to better understand customer behaviors, giving you the ability to better serve your customers with an improved experience. By fully discovering the many interactions between people and content, you can implement or accelerate contactless banking and minimize in-person interactions for activities such as customer onboarding, account management, and credit applications.

KYC/AML Compliance

Financial crimes such as terrorist activity, money laundering, and fraud often occur through fooling institutions’ processes. KYC compliance, or “know your customer,” and “Anti Money Laundering” procedures and reporting are now required for most financial institutions, putting pressure on financial institutions to accurately verify customer identities when opening or maintaining accounts. KYC/AML policies require “reasonable due diligence” to know and retain the essential facts concerning every customer.

With process intelligence in place, financial institutions can uncover suspicious interactions between financial institutions and customers with the ability to identify and flag questionable documentation and process breaches. In addition, process intelligence can be used to monitor processes for compliance and can send alerts when process exceptions occur.

Fraud Prevention and Risk Management

Ironically, faster processes can increase the risk of fraud. Attacks are most likely to occur through process vulnerabilities and fraudulent documents. With a thorough understanding of processes using process intelligence, financial institutions can identify vulnerabilities in near real-time, and automate paper-based processes with the ability to flag suspicious behaviors. With the tools and processes in hand to quickly spot fraudulent behavior, financial services companies can achieve significant cost savings by preventing check, loan, and payment authorization fraud. For example, when a bank receives a check, an automated process solution can validate documents using reference images and signature comparison to verify the authenticity of a check to prevent forgery or counterfeits.

Process intelligence is the on-ramp to successful automation. Because processes continually change in response to the customer, business, and regulatory needs, the pace of change is too fast to track manually. By automating process discovery with process intelligence, banks, and other financial services companies can take the guesswork out of identifying the right processes to automate and better realize their goals to improve the customer experience and reduce operational costs.

To learn more about how Process Intelligence can help your financial institution, get in touch!