Improving 'outside-in': ANZ's process success

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The competition in financial services is heating up, and business process excellence is proving to be a key influence on how banks remain competitive in today’s market.

Ahead of Process Excellence for Financial Services 2014, Dan Hickey, Head of Business Improvement at ANZ Institutional and International Bank, discusses the bank’s process improvement results as well as a potentially crucial pitfall.

Every project we do is data focused; identifying the appropriate metrics, establishing a base line and – where applicable – using input-related data. This ensures we’re not concentrating only on the immediate problems, but the root cause.

The majority of process improvement projects are time-efficiency related, encompassing end-to-end cycle times from a customer perspective.

With banks traditionally having quite siloed operating structures, transparency from using analytics has made a real difference. ANZ has bolstered process throughput by well up to 90 per cent in some areas, such as customer onboarding, credit approval timeliness and limit transfer speed.

We’ve also seen strong short-term savings in offshoring our back-end processes over the past 3 to 5 years. ANZ has three main offshoring hubs: one in India, one in the Philippines and one in China that are driving global process standardisation, significant efficiency and productivity gains.

We’re a global bank and one of the key challenges is maintaining regulatory compliance across the many countries ANZ operates in.

There’s particular focus on efforts around ensuring compliance in the area of AML and KYC without negatively affecting the NEW customers’ experience.

Improving ‘outside-in’

Successful customer outcomes (SCOs) should take greater precedence in process improvement programs. Banks have traditionally delegated customer engagement to relationship managers and frontline sales staff.

ANZ hasn’t yet embraced customer-centred design for process improvement, but it has in the area of Technology. The development of customer-centred ‘apps’ like ANZ Go Money has won many awards.

Building customer experience metrics depends on actually knowing what makes a great customer experience. CX ratings can make all the difference to mapping the customer journey in its truest form.

And the layering of those ratings needs to be addressed; statistical findings are only surface-representative. It’s the underlying characteristics which can make a profound impact – opinions, attitudes and ways of thinking.

Looking from the outside-in is paramount to truly understanding our customers, and process excellence needs to reflect that – for all banks.

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