From macroeconomic shifts to geopolitical instabilities and regulatory changes, the latter half of the 2020s promises to pose some complex challenges for the banking industry.
Resilience and agility are critical for navigating these uncertainties. Your institution must be able to adapt to the rapidly changing environment—otherwise you risk falling behind, losing customers, or even facing non-compliance.
This requires moving away from ineffective, cumbersome processes and embracing digital transformation.
With the helping hand of technology, you can improve your core banking operations, enhance your data maturity, and develop more competitive services. All of which will help you prepare for the changes ahead.
4 banking operations process improvement ideas
Digital transformation can be a daunting concept, particularly for an industry that’s slow to embrace change. That’s why it’s important to take it one step (or process) at a time.
If you’re struggling to know where to start, don’t worry. To help you on your transformation journey, we’ve compiled 4 process improvements for your bank to consider:
1. Automate repetitive tasks and processes
As well as speeding up your core processes, banking automation can lead to an average cost reduction of 20 to 30%. This makes it a compelling opportunity for banks of all sizes—especially considering interest margins are set to decline in the coming year.
Yet despite all automation has to offer, the financial services industry is still lagging behind. In fact, a recent report found that up to 86% of financial professionals still depend on Excel for budgeting and forecasting, and 75% use manual reviews and approvals.
This is inefficient to say the least. Manual processes not only waste valuable time, but can lead to inaccuracies that impact decision making and skew financial projections.
With a comprehensive, no-code business process automation platform, you can turn manual processes—such as reconciliations, loan processing, fraud detection, and customer onboarding—into slick automated workflows. This not only speeds up your teams, but can go a long way in boosting customer experience and retention.
2. Leverage data analytics for better decision making
Your bank has a wealth of data at its disposal. But unless you have a way to consolidate this data and derive insights from it, it won’t be worth much at all.
You most likely already use software to ensure data governance and quality. To enhance your analytics efforts, however, it’s worth feeding this data into an accessible, company-wide hub.
With the right digital workplace solution, you can build processes for capturing data, embed external sources, and spin-up visual dashboards. This can be brilliant for:
- Monitoring threats and indicators of financial crime.
- Identifying patterns in consumer behaviors, which can form the basis of your future product improvements.
- Analyzing the competitor landscape as well as customer feedback.
- Preparing for the anticipated Basel III Endgame obligations, which will require you to more accurately calculate (and report) risk-weighted assets (RWAs).
- Spotting operational inefficiencies in your processes, such as the time it takes to process a loan application or respond to a support request.
3. Standardize compliance and auditing procedures
Over a third of compliance officers believe their biggest challenge is the complexity of regulatory enforcement. With rules continuously changing—and instances of financial crime and money laundering growing—this will come as no surprise.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to fortify your compliance procedures and streamline your auditing processes, so long as you lean on the right technology.
Take Claromentis as an example. Our full digital workplace solution, comprising three distinct platforms, empowers you to:
- Enforce policy compliance. Upload and share your critical regulatory policies in a secure, version-controlled policy management application. This ensures every employee understands and complies with the relevant obligations.
- Standardize procedures and evidence collection. Build structured e-forms to simplify your regulatory obligations, such as reporting a breach and vetting a supplier.
- Organize your auditing procedures. With a built-in project management application, you can assign tasks and keep track of your compliance obligations. This is especially helpful when preparing for internal and external audits.
- Distribute trackable compliance training. Create engaging, multimedia e-learning courses centered around the latest compliance updates, cybersecurity concerns and more. Admins can keep tabs on training completion rates and identify any areas for improvement. What’s more, you can use individual training reports as evidence during your external audits.
- Access convenient compliance templates. Short on time or don’t know where to start with our business process automation software? Our marketplace provides a range of free automation templates, including forms for data access requests, incident reporting, risks and opportunity management, and internal audits.
4. Build competitive self-service channels
Consumers crave convenience. They want autonomy over when and how they adopt your services—and they don’t need to be handheld throughout the process.
To satisfy this expectation, you need to go beyond mobile-friendly websites and handy banking applications. How? By reinventing your inefficient processes and providing self-service alternatives.
This could be as simple as building an automated process for updating account holder details, or as complex as creating a do-it-yourself mortgage application e-form. Once a customer submits the required details, your teams will automatically receive the information and a workflow will kick into action.
This is a faster, more transparent method of progressing financial applications, support requests, and customer services. It also reduces the need for long phone calls and in-person visits.
That said, be sure to make these self-service options as intuitive as possible. While 70% of customers already use self-service channels, only 9% of them are able to resolve a problem without having to speak to an agent. Therefore, prioritize clarity and efficiency. Be clear about what you need from your customers and make the steps as simple as possible.
Improve your processes to improve your outcomes
When it comes to digital innovation, many banks are still lagging far behind.
There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from data security concerns to cumbersome on-premise legacy technology. But, while challenging, these reasons are not insurmountable.
With a solution like Claromentis, you can improve your processes and implement effective digital transformation without compromise. Our integrated digital workplace solution—comprising intranet, business process automation, and e-learning platforms—is:
- Secure by design. Claromentis is HIPAA compliant and ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015 certified. More than this, we’ve baked security into every crevice of our solution. With granular permissions, IP-based access controls, two-factor authentication, and audit logs, you can keep your sensitive customer and financial data safe.
- Available on-premise and in the cloud. Whether it’s for peace of mind or regulatory obligation, we understand that many banks prefer on-premise digital workplace solutions. That’s why we offer flexible digital workplace deployments.
- Easy to use. Our drag-and-drop interface and no-code business automation platform empower everyone in your organization to collaborate effectively and build world-class processes, no matter their technical ability.
- Feature-rich. You can choose to adopt one, two, or all three of our integrated platforms. With the full suite, you’ll benefit from an extensive range of communication, automation, productivity, and e-learning capabilities.
We’ve helped many financial services organizations across the globe, including The Central Bank of the Bahamas, unify their teams, improve core banking operational efficiency, and pave the way for sustainable success.
If you’d like to see how we could do the same for your institution, book an exclusive demo of our digital workplace solution.