What to Consider When Designing Banking Workflows for Customer Experience

Improving the customer experience (CX) is the number one top priority for big banks today. Of the 50 largest international banks, three out of four now pledge themselves to some form of customer-experience transformation, according to McKinsey.

In an increasingly competitive market, financial institutions are massively adopting emerging technologies to stay relevant and meet new customer demands. Issues involving the lending lifecycle, risk management, compliance, and account management are normally riddled with bottlenecks in the banking workflows themselves. Intelligent business process management software (iBPMS) offers a solution to improving the customer experience of banks today.

This blog post explores use cases of iBPMS in finance, automating the offices of the bank and common mistakes when implementing and designing banking workflows, concluding with a summary regarding the need for digital transformation.

What does iBPMS in finance look like?

The most widespread trend in the banking industry today is the shift to digital. In an era marked by convenience and speed, customers don’t want to waste their time with a bank that won’t give them a seamless customer experience. To achieve this, banks are turning to iBPMS.

BPM itself is a wider discipline that involves improving business processes continuously in an enterprise. In short, it’s a mindset. When this is applied through technology, the software component holds the power to automate formerly paper-ridden, labor-intensive, manual business processes.

For banks especially, moving with speed and agility in rapid, yet accurate decision-making is crucial to staying competitive in the current market. iBPMS digitizes the workflows within multiple bank departments, orchestrating harmony between people, work, and systems on one centralized software platform. How does iBPMS do this? In the bank, these platforms seek to digitize the front, middle, and offices of financial institutions to create a fluid customer experience.

Automating the front, middle, and back offices for better CX

Finance and FinTech experts commonly split the bank into three distinct sections: the front, middle, and back offices. The front office consists of client-facing roles, those in sales, research, and trading. The middle office involves people who directly support the front office, including risk management, compliance, finance, and accounting positions. Lastly, the back office is almost exclusively operational. People with back-office roles work in settlements, HR, and technology to keep the bank functioning “behind the scenes.”

While the front office is the only office focused on improving bank customer communication, the efficiency of the middle and back offices is crucial to delivering an optimal customer experience on the front end. When there is a hiccup in any department, the whole system suffers. This interconnectedness is why having sound business processes in place is critical to determine a bank’s success.

There are several use cases involved when tackling the three offices of the bank. Below are examples of designing banking workflows that ultimately enhance the customer experience.

• Front office. iBPMS allows seamless account onboarding in multiple delivery channels, whether it be online, at the branch, or via mobile app. This is because everything is conducted through the same platform. Designing banking workflows on the front end enables your bank to sync stakeholders and each part of the transaction process in one easy-to-read overlay. Not only will they be able to see everything that is happening on the customer side, but the bank can also stay compliant at the same time — further adding to the guarantee of exceeding customer expectations.
  
• Middle office. For compliance, intelligent banking workflows can help classify documents by reporting all of the KYC details needed for FATCA activities. Through streamlined workflow automation, you can handle multiple complex relationships — creating better visibility, control, and data security in your bank. You can even automate the reporting process from end-to-end automation, including data aggregation, validation, custom reports, multi-channel distribution and archiving. This makes verifying information for the next audit simple.
• Back office. Many banks still rely on legacy point solutions to conduct business. These systems lack the ability to work together, resulting in disjointed coordination between stakeholders and software. By designing banking workflows that integrate the systems that HR and IT use daily, a bank can create better coordination behind the scenes, which is inevitably noticed by the customer.

Common mistakes when designing banking workflows

When implementing a BPM at your bank, you’ll want to pay special attention to some common pitfalls. Below we have listed the ones associated with the finance industry.

1. Not involving key stakeholders during the planning phase. One of the greatest mistakes banks make when implementing a BPM is not involving the people affected by the workflows the most while planning. This isn’t just limited to the C-suite at your bank; consider the people running the show on the ground, your customers, and prospective clients. Missing someone important could backfire when it comes to process deployment time.
   
2. Failure to set measurable outcomes. Not setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a surefire way to fail. As the old adage says, “fail to plan, plan to fail.” How can your bank determine if its digital transformation efforts are a success if KPIs aren’t set from the beginning? Understanding why you are improving your core business processes and what you intend to improve from the get-go greatly increases your likelihood of successful implementation.
   
3. Not planning for compliance. Banks are among the most heavily-regulated entities in the world. Designing banking workflows that don’t account for every regulation that applies to your bank is the easiest way to attain a penalty fee or run into legal trouble. Leave the lawsuits and tarnished reputation out of your chances and plan for regulators, auditors, and local laws from day one.
   
4. Overlooking your legacy systems. Many banks are ready to rid themselves of their existing investments, but can’t justify the cost of investing in a new solution to replace them. The good news for you is that you don’t have to nix everything to improve your business processes. In fact, a quality iBPMS is going to help integrate these multiple disparate systems into one solution, helping you create workflows that incorporate these investments.

Conclusion

In recent years, the financial landscape has undergone considerable changes in operation. Under pressure from competing entities like FinTech startups, digital wallets, neobanks, and apps, banks must deliver a world-class customer experience to attract and retain loyal customers. Without it, banks don’t stand a chance among competitors who are more proactive.

In order to overcome these obstacles, financial institutions must begin with their business processes — the very things that power the operating system of the enterprise. Banks require a nimble yet robust platform that drives consistent, rapid decision-making while seeking to better understand the end-user.

For a financial institution to retain its credibility and provide the highest quality customer experience, iBPMS is the answer. Designing banking workflows with the previously stated considerations in mind is guaranteed to improve the end-to-end customer experience.

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Hundreds of commercial customers, including many Fortune 100 companies, rely on ProcessMaker to digitally transform their core business processes enabling faster decision making, improved compliance, and better performance. Schedule your free demo today here to realize the potential of ProcessMaker.