Whether your bank is rapidly expanding into new markets or experiencing the growing pains of digital transformation, having access to the right bank workflow management solutions and tools to succeed is critical in helping your bank stay competitive. It also drives employee productivity, leading to better working relationships and magnifying the positive effects of an effective workflow platform.
For banks specifically, unified departments, systems, and ways of working means your bank has a greater chance of overcoming common challenges against the financial industry. These include strict regulation, cybersecurity threats, risk management, and the increasing demand to deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
There’s a lot of variables the members of your executive board and other stakeholders in choosing a quality workflow platform. Here are five things you need to consider when considering a workflow solution for your financial institution.
1. Who are the stakeholders in the decision-making process?
Before making any decision, consider whose input has weight and who is left out. When adopting any new software or workflow solution, it’s important to pick a solution based on the people who are actually using it every day. This boils down to choosing a platform for your bank with a great end-user experience for nontechnical staff, making learning a new platform easy due to intuitive, navigational user interfaces.
More often than not, the high-level executives aren’t the stakeholders who will have to use this software to conduct business every day. While the IT department may work to build and execute the workflows themselves, nontechnical personnel are also executing workflows.
For the C-suite and upper management, ensure smooth workflow adoption by meeting people right where they are at—consider factors like diversity in skills, technological adaptability levels among employees, multiple departments across the bank itself working with old legacy systems, and your bank’s resistance to change due to the conservative nature of finance.
In this process, be realistic about your bank’s needs and size. If you are a larger, multinational institution, it will take time to adapt and implement, even with a focused approach. A local bank may benefit from a less robust workflow solution, but it really depends on the capabilities of the bank and those using the platform
2. Will my bank be able to implement without the need for deep technical knowledge?
In addition to taking into account user experience, the new solution must be easy to adopt. The last thing any bank needs is extra time and money spent on learning a new workflow solution that is too technical.
Automation, artificial intelligence, and integrating workflow solutions into banks is a relatively new phenomenon. Many banks aren’t equipped with the technical knowledge required to build and/or deploy a code-heavy workflow software. A solution that requires minimal coding knowledge is ideal, meaning your business development staff can build workflows with ease.
Consider a solution that allows your bank staff to design with previous process components in place, reducing the need to design workflows from scratch. These components make it really easy to design processes drag-and-drop style, without heavy programming needed.
3. Is the workflow software cross-compatible with the current system?
Another factor to consider when adopting a workflow solution is the system’s compatibility with your bank’s legacy systems, current software, and ways of working. This is especially true when considering a BPM OEM white-label solution, or one where a solution is purchased, then white-labeled, and operated under your bank’s brand.
When considering an OEM workflow solution, or any solution, your IT department should work to understand the software’s integration abilities within the bank’s current system. Not to mention, making note of taking on a workflow solution that allows you to replicate tasks and increase ownership and deliver better experiences, all within compliance standards.
Things like plug-ins, customizable packages, and other features are going to improve the quality of how your bank conducts business. Legacy systems often rely on manual processes, industry knowledge passed down from one expert to the next, and inefficient ways to collect data. Working within these traditional constraints as seamlessly as possible is key as your bank adopts a workflow solution.
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4. Is the platform going to help fight the financial industry’s challenges?
Banks have an increasingly demanding environment to operate within, thanks to strict regulatory requirements, security threats, illicit transactions, and consumer demand for omnichannel customer experiences. A huge factor to consider when choosing the right solution for your banking process workflow is whether or not this software is going to help overcome these challenges. After all, aside from increasing company revenue, ensuring a software or method is actually addressing industry challenges is the greatest indicator of determining the efficiency of a workflow solution.
This would speak more to the capabilities of the platform. Additional questions to ask include:
“Does the platform account increase security against fraud and money laundering?”
“Does the platform increase productivity among bank staff, leading to savings and greater impact to drive company revenue?”
“Can adopting new technology directly prove its positive effect on serving customers in a more timely, efficient manner?”
Weighing the workflow solution’s features and capabilities with its track record to back up its claims is important. You want to ensure that you are investing in a quality product that is proven to create similar success at other financial institutions.
5. Will the software scale well as the bank grows and changes in strategy over time?
It’s a well-known fact that technology gets outdated fast. That doesn’t mean you not invest in the best available tech in the market during your search for the right solution for your bank. Just be sure it is aligned with your bank’s long-term growth strategy.
Pay attention to tech trends that reputable sources like Gartner and Forrester say are improving the quality of banking experiences. Choosing a solution that incorporates these methods and technologies is going to better serve your bank in the long-run. In the short-term, updated tools give your bank an immediate return on investment.
Banks adopting new software to help improve bank operations see an improvement in countless areas: introduction of standardization, higher employee experience, faster delivery of customer service, and reduced time spent on mundane, repetitive tasks.
To further prove its importance, Gartner reports that “financial executives from huge corporate establishments revealed that 62% feel digital transformation is a management initiative while remaining consider it as a part of optimization.”
Choosing a bank workflow management solution that is on track to produce better solutions for their customers is important to note. Is the workflow solution taking advantage of digital transformative tools like robotic process automation (RPA)? Is it using machine learning to gather more data and make more informed decisions aligned with the bank’s strategy?
These are additional questions that fall into scalability to ask, along with if the workflow solution provides ample support for your staff post-implementation.
Choosing the right workflow solution for your bank requires a holistic thinking process.
There are many variables to consider when choosing the right workflow solution for your bank. Making sure every key decision-maker is present in your decision is critical to address diversity, new perspectives, and ensure a smooth onboarding process for stakeholders on the daily operations level. In addition, an easy-to-use, scalable, and effective workflow solution is going to yield the best results in a bank’s long-term strategy.
Need an expert to walk you through the steps of purchasing or building your first workflow solution? Learn about our Workflow solutions for banking and retail & commercial account opening specialize in helping banks improve customer experience.
About ProcessMaker:
ProcessMaker is a low-code business process management and workflow software. ProcessMaker makes it easy for business analysts to collaborate with IT to automate complex business processes connecting people and existing company systems. Headquartered in Durham, North Carolina in the United States, ProcessMaker has a partner network spread across 35 countries on five continents. Hundreds of commercial customers, including many Fortune 100 companies, rely on ProcessMaker to digitally transform their core business processes enabling faster decision making, improved compliance, and better performance.
