BPM in Banking

Banking and financial services work primarily exist in manual processes and multiple systems, and these cause associates to miss out on customer experiences, like understanding their clients fully. They can also cause more errors.

The solution is simple and often overlooked. Businesses need to delegate work and resources to the right place at the right time, with an established business model that allows for full process oversight. Businesses working in a highly regulated market, such as the banking sector, need to ensure compliance while doing so.

Redefining BPM in the Banking and Financial Industry

Think about the time spent processing data and documents — email, faxes, online, etc. Coupled with growing customer expectations, finance and banking industry firms struggle to minimize errors and keep up with inconsistent processes, manual personalization for customer accounts, and excessive but necessary business rules and regulatory requirements.

Business process management (BPM) is a tool to help organizations reduce time, error, and costs by improving operational efficiency. BPM allows businesses to create larger margins and increase customer satisfaction with straight-through processing and digital onboarding. This improvement gives associates more time to focus on key issues and value-adding activities, such as spending more time on strategic decision-making and efforts to improve customer experiences.

Digital transformation in banking starts with BPM. With a full overview and understanding of banking business processes, institutions can introduce effective and scalable business process automation solutions. BPM helps institutions establish a digital transformation strategy and transition from slow processes in traditional banking to streamlined online banking services.

Benefits of BPM in banking

BPM allows organizations to analyze their processes wholly or individually to identify their current state and uncover opportunities to improve efficiency. BPM tools help design, model, execute, monitor, and optimize the bank workflow by coordinating information, systems, and behaviors.

For financial institutions, BPM is a key technique for improving customer service, increasing profitability, and reducing operational costs. It helps organizations standardize their internal processes and measure their performance quickly and accurately.

Where can you use business process management in banking?

• Utilize process design for loans, asset transfers, know-your-customer (KYC), hardship withdrawals, and account maintenance.
• Increase visibility into employee performance metric scores.
• Accelerate customer service resolution and increase customer satisfaction.
• Reduce paperwork and errors across banking operations.
• Improve the quality and speed of customer onboarding.
• Improve regulatory compliance through standardized processing.
• Boost the speed and accuracy of fraud detection.
• Gain performance insights into products and services for better decision-making.

Combining RPA and BPM for Automation in Banking

Within intelligent automation (IA) is robotic process automation (RPA). RPA deploys digital workers to automate repeatable tasks within established business processes to reduce costs and increase speed and accuracy.

How do banks use automation?

RPA and BPM work best together. RPA automates individual tasks, while BPM analyzes, measures, optimizes, and orchestrates complex processes. This is a huge asset for regulated industries such as banks and financial institutions. It allows for easily regulated automated processes to ensure the digital workforce complies with industry standards.

Benefits of RPA and BPM working together

Combining RPA with BPM improves the overall effectiveness of your automation initiatives:

• Centralized orchestration allows enterprises to manage and monitor their entire automation ecosystem, including RPA, from a single platform.
• Enhanced workload management capabilities enable businesses to distribute work among digital workers based on availability, skillsets, and priority.
• Improved analytics and reporting offer valuable insights into digital workers’ performances and help measure return on investment (ROI).
• Increased flexibility and scalability by deploying additional digital workers or expanding automation to new processes.
• Reduced complexity with streamlined processing automation that helps employees understand and use the system.
  

How Does BPM Work in Banking?

Let’s talk about how BPM improves banking processes.

BPM is often seen as the building block organizations use to transform operations. With processes increasing in complexity, institutions need to orchestrate their strategies and performances. Below are some examples of how banking and financial institutions implement BPM to accomplish this:

Customer onboarding

Customer expectations are growing when it comes to faster, more accurate, and personalized services. New customers want a seamless onboarding process, and BPM can help banks streamline and automate their end-to-end onboarding process. It removes bottlenecks, speeds up processing and response time, and routes exceptional cases to the right people to ensure they’re handled.

By automating manual processes, reducing paperwork, and speeding up the onboarding journey, BPM enhances the overall customer experience. Customers appreciate a seamless onboarding process that requires minimal effort and time, which increases their loyalty and satisfaction.

Risk and compliance management

BPM can help identify risks in banking activities by monitoring tasks and ensuring consistency in how tasks are executed and documented. BPM can provide near real-time tracking of compliance requirements to generate accurate compliance reports. This keeps banks on top of their processes and gives them more accurate and timely readings for risk assessment.

Loan approval

BPM can automate and streamline end-to-end loan processing, including application submission, eligibility checks, credit assessment, documentation, back-office review, underwriting, verification, and approval. It keeps a reliable audit trail while assigning and tracking tasks and can create real-time notifications and escalations to reduce delays. Overall, BPM enables faster processing, which helps customers receive better service without long wait times.

Payment processing

BPM can streamline payment processing workflows such as payment initiation, authorization, settlement, and reconciliation. Banks can manage different payment types (e.g., wire transfers, ACH, card transactions) efficiently while ensuring compliance with payment regulations.

What Is Next for Automation at Banks?

The transformative power of automation in banking is just getting started. Organizations are looking for more ways to unify their human and digital workforce, lower operational costs and improve productivity without sacrificing service quality or employee satisfaction. IA and BPM are important steps on that journey to better work.

Why financial services firms and banks choose Chorus

SS&C | Blue Prism® Chorus is a comprehensive BPM platform designed to help businesses orchestrate mission-critical processes at an enterprise scale so they can better engage with customers, improve operational efficiencies, cut costs, and reduce risk. This BPM solution helps firms reduce compliance risks and avoid penalties and makes the daily work of financial services and banking professionals much easier and more efficient.

Chorus seamlessly connects people, processes, data, digital workers, and systems to deliver the right work to the right resource at the right time — across your entire business.

Watch our on-demand webinar to learn more.