Now, more than ever, consumers have become highly critical and skeptical of financial services firms. People want assurance and move visibility into the operations, fees and services offered to them. To gain back customer trust and loyalty – while driving greater profitability, growth and agility – you need to focus on how your organization will address three key areas.

Three BIG topics in financial services you need to pay attention to, right now:

The Compliance Challenge
In the world of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II code, MiFID, etc., you need a solid platform in place that supports current regulations – but more importantly, creates an environment in which adaptability is a fundamental component. New, stricter regulations are knocking on the door. To avoid a significant drain on resources, money, and time, it’s critical that you invest in a tool that enables you to achieve compliance on a long-term basis without having to significantly alter your operational systems. Business process management (BPM) can help financial services companies define, automate and standardize processes to be both auditable and consistent. By leveraging the existing underlying systems, and providing a more agile platform that is integrated with them but enables control and automation across systems and departments, you are able to implement changes in a fraction of the time you could with legacy systems. Most regulatory mandates require you to provide a wealth of information and audit trails. With BPM, you can track, monitor, and report on critical processes to not only comply with federal regulations, but better improve current processes to drive enterprise-wide efficiency and profitability.

Better Customer Experience
No new customer wants to spend weeks (and even months) getting their account started. The fact of the matter is, in many financial service companies customers go through a long, rigorous process to open their account – all of which is caused by ineffective, poorly structured new client on-boarding processes. One of our customers, Cornerstone Tax Advisors, had an extensive, paper-based on-boarding process, and as a result the time between the first client interaction and the conclusion of the contract ranged from 11-20 months! However, by using Metastorm BPM, the company was able to control and monitor in-bound workflow with ease, visualize its operational positions, and easily design, model, and change its new client on-boarding processes – radically improving the customer experience, and allowing the company to bring on new clients better and faster.

Smart Consolidation
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant amount of consolidation within the financial services industry. The reason for this is simple – companies want to expand their portfolio, gain more market share, increase their customer base and achieve higher profitability. Unfortunately, almost half of the companies that undergo a merger or acquisition do not achieve the original goals. This is largely due to not having clear objectives – that take into account the organizational structure – to meet the strategic goals of the acquisition. An enterprise architecture tool can help you understand the people, processes, systems and technologies within both companies. Taking it a step further, with an enterprise architecture tool you can analyze, model and simulate the optimal way for these processes to merge together – producing the best business structure possible for your organization.

As the world recovers from the economic crisis it is imperative that you have all the resources to make well-informed business decisions. You need to know what capabilities and assets you have and the best way to manage and utilize them to remain a viable competitor in this ever-changing marketplace. To find out more information about Metastorm’s financial services solutions, visit our financial services solution page.

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While the results of the poll were obviously influenced by the composition of the webinar attendees, the results can also be tied back to key market drivers.  In the past several years, both financial services and pharmaceutical companies have faced major compliance and regulation overhauls – forcing these companies to rethink and remodel they way they operate their business in order to cooperate with new compliance mandates.  These organizations are scrambling to meet new reporting requirements (and often want to be the leader in responding to them) and still push out new, successful and innovative products.  So, it makes sense that these organizations are looking for a framework that offers them expansive, accurate visibility into their organization. It is critical that the organization understands how they operate and how they can address these new requirements so that they can remain profitable in the market place and get ahead of the competition. 

However, organizations don’t just need a quick solution to solve one individual regulation.  They need a strong framework to prepare them for and support all change that is to come.

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“As we rolled out standard end-to-end business processes to users, BPM tools enabled users to see the big picture and put their role in context by understanding upstream and downstream process and data flows,” said an executive of the pharmaceutical company.

The article highlights how the company used BPM for various purposes from clinical trials to supply chain optimization. It started adopting BPM so much in fact; that it established a BPM Center of Excellence.

The article further discusses how BPM can be used for other purposes within the pharmaceutical industry such as integrating and managing communications between various manufacturing-related systems

Read the full article for more details on how the pharmaceutical company was able to fully adopt BPM throughout the company.

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