The Tech Driven Path to Operational Excellence in Banking

In the fiercely competitive world of financial services, achieving operational excellence is key in the continuous development of efficiency, productivity and improvement of customer experience. 

Operational excellence is not just about improving productivity, but making sure to provide customers with the best service while assuring agility and quality of service. Without a differentiated service level it really makes it hard to compete beyond product features and price. 

A seamless customer experience (CX) is critical for banks and by streamlining processes, making them as frictionless as possible, as automated as needed, then they can deliver reliable services, nurture and retain as well as attract new clients. 

This demands some in-depth work into how these processes are serving customers at banks currently. As this is not a straightforward assignment, especially as services get accumulated over time, it can be challenging to get a clear analysis of the areas to improve and their processes. 

To remedy this, CX teams within banks can use sophisticated process mining tools on top of the more traditional operational walkthroughs. This can more easily highlight what needs to be adapted, reimagined and replaced. In such a scenario, process mining can help visualise and analyse business processes to reveal how the organisation runs and where the bottlenecks occur. It can help banks see the broken processes, understand their cause and the next steps which are needed to fill the gaps and improve operational functions. It can recommend team and skill changes needed, such as increasing the level of cross-skilling in an area that gets constant peaks which negatively impact service levels.

This is then the step off point to be able to use data and re-imagine a process. Redesigning this can be sped up using generative AI and industry best practices - both those available from solution providers as well as industry consultants. This is far easier than it used to be now. I recall spending 3 intense days and then a couple of months after designing SAP processes for a bank 20+ years ago. This can now be done in a few hours with teams collaborating on solutions where new designs can be quickly co-designed.

The Role of Low-Code Developments and Agentic guardrails in Operational Efficiency

As financial services companies understand the areas where there is opportunity to improve, there are multiple ways through which they can work on improving their systems and processes. Low code applications can be setup to enable teams to quickly take advantage of data and redesign applications in a short period of time, customising them to meet the specific requirements.  In operations, there will always be a focus on customer service levels first, followed by efficiency and productivity measures. Something which often needs more attention is data and process quality. However, the days of needing data quality teams to check data manually are gone, with generative AI and intelligent document processing easily able to do automated checking and escalate any uncertainty to a staff member or return erroneous or missing data to a customer or 3rd party broker.

None of this gets away from needing to keep customers updated in real time of their account activity, eliminating any errors that could potentially happen from manual tasks. For operations, whilst frictionless processes with maximum levels of automation are a clear goal, then it’s transparency of both process steps, service levels and rationale for decisions that comes a close second. This is even more the case with agentic agents taking data, making decisions and processing steps automatically. There’s no doubt that the same levels of policy, rule and exception frameworks need to be applied to agents as those done with staff today. In the past, a regulator would query how both automated and manual credit decisions are checked for fairness and following credit risk appetite. This will be no different for AI and Agentic AI agents. Governance, predictability and controls will still be required.

The financial services industry is transforming at a rapid rate and operational excellence plays a key role in improving efficiencies, streamlining workflows, and creating better customer service experience. This is even more the case in times of economic and revenue uncertainty. All organisations, especially banks, turn to the certainty of controlling costs. Tools like process mining, low code applications and transparent, controlled addition of Agentic AI agents will enable banks to elevate their operational excellence to the next level, providing employees and customers with efficient systems that ensure minimal errors.