BrainBlog for Camunda by Jason English
Recent events such as the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank have put a spotlight on the responsible governance of decisions and business processes within banks. Financial services firms—including retail and commercial banks, brokerages and investment firms—have the most to gain from process orchestration, and the most to lose without it.
While money and other instruments of value may be changing hands with each transaction, most customer interactions with a financial firm are ultimately defined by digital processes—i.e. moving data around and sharing information according to the expected customer workflow requirements and regulatory norms of the industry.
To improve a business, improve its processes. Sounds simple enough, but there are thousands of possible ways to go about this process transformation. Fortunately, there are some proven patterns to follow.
If virtually any software-and-data defined business process could be better automated, where do the firms that are most successful in process orchestration start? We gathered four winning process orchestration plays that have already yielded productive results for financial institutions.
1. Risk management
Given the current business environment, it would be irresponsible to overlook risk management processes as the lead process orchestration challenge for banks.
While all financial institutions have some form of systems in place to identify, measure, monitor, and control risk, it is far from a standardized process happening within a single application. Critical risk functions still depend largely on the expertise of executives, auditors and risk management professionals to set policies and provide oversight for ongoing operations such as loan acceptance, liquidity ratios or tax compliance.
Unfortunately, it takes a long time to build such expertise, and experienced individuals who understand the breadth of interconnected fiduciary, property, tax, money laundering, fraud, and reporting risks and requirements facing the institution will always be in short supply. 
The play: Encapsulate the knowledge of the most experienced risk management professionals in administrative and operations roles, by mapping the systems they use for analysis and collaboration with others when determining policies. Process orchestration can then start to replace the need for individual involvement at each step by automating handoffs and signoffs wherever possible, while experts follow analytics for risk anomalies that require expert decisions and approvals.
2. Regulatory compliance and auditing
Regulatory pressures are also on the rise to protect national and global banking systems from well-publicized governance problems. But compliance requirements are also a knock-on effect of sophisticated criminal activity, and the shifting geo-political landscape we live in.
There are three big preventative compliance processes happening within most US and European financial services firms, though the specific regulations may vary by country or region: Know Your Customer (or, KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (or AML), and Counter-Terrorist Finance (or CTF).
Banks must conduct a series of checks when acquiring new customers or setting up additional accounts, verifying the identity of applicants, as well as the sources and potential destinations of any funds to be moved through the accounts.
Since laws vary widely between nations and states, processes must support the automated lookup of public records and commercial background checks, a decision and auditing process, and the resulting reporting of KYC/AML and anti-terrorism anomalies to appropriate authorities for that regulatory regime.
The play: Meet the complicated needs and regulatory deadlines for compliance checks and reporting, without overstretching the bank’s staff resources, or causing lengthy customer wait times.
One of Denmark’s largest international banks, Jyske Bank, used Camunda process automation software to offer as many as 20 thousand daily customer self-service account applications, with automated case handling across systems and reporting of each KYC/AML compliance check. This delivered a smooth customer onboarding (or rejection) process while saving their employees as much as 80% of the previously required manual data entry and review time, so auditors could focus on particularly critical anomalies or assisting important customers.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
