End to End Workflow for Eliminating systemic architecture redundancies.

Due to market demand for more integrated services and the need for banks to acquire and retain customers, todays successful banks and banking related service companies are adding ever more sophisticated channels at an ever-increasing rate. The dynamics of the market and the underlying technology are shifting the focus of regional banking more towards customer service. As a result, the pace of innovation in banking services is rapidly becoming unsustainable. Compounding the problem is the reality that many bank products and marketing strategies are not keeping up with the times. Branch managements planning that is traditionally done once a year, assumes a steady state market over annual periods. These strategies are woefully inadequate to keep up with a dynamic market and ever shortening product life cycles. Clearly, a steady state business model is no longer an effective tool in the branch banking business. The new product development, sales and services demand rapid reconfigurations. Now banks try to introduce new products within 3 to 6 months, without impacting quality of service or regulatory compliance processes. In view of that, corporate strategies need to be flexible to keep pace with the market dynamics. The focus on a banks quality and profitability is needed in order to: Maximize cost efficiency of all channels, Improve customer service quality levels, and Maximize the ability to acquire and retain quality customers. Time allocation for IT platform implementation and maintenance has to be minimized to make time for business analysis. Maximizing revenue and minimizing excess capacity is the main charter of the decision makers. As a result, most retail banks focus on alignment of productivity and profitability. Although retail bank management understands the need for such alignment, the challenge is identifying the right methods and tools and, then implementing them to properly allocate resources to processes. With escalating market changes, banks are faced with growing backlogs of such issues and too often are driven to quick decisions leading to undesirable results. A common dissatisfaction amongst senior managers is spending too much time on development of productivity models and too little time on analysis and solutions. General consensus is that proper tools are hard to find or worse are inaccurate. Most banks end up buying tools based on the virtue of a sales pitch than the merits of the tool itself. Inaccurate tools provide incomplete or erroneous information that lead to ineffective product deployment. Experience has shown that a tool with a sound design and focused on a specified application, reduces overall time spent on implementation and maintenance and allows more time for effective decision-making. The ultimate goal of customer centric processes is to improve profitability. Market history has shown us that customer acquisition and retention is dependent on customer satisfaction. It is the most valuable asset to the bank brand and is fundamental to the organic expansion of the customer base. Today, customer experience is often the only differentiator as it is difficult to perceive the difference between retail banks with look-alike branches, similar channels and identical products. However, significant differences can be made through creating subtle changes in products and service quality Industry data shows that only 20% of the customers are profitable and 30% of the customers are incurring losses. To address this, Retail Banks have been working on the improvement of their understanding of

customers and their expectations. The level of customer data and the ability to farm customer information from the data is not always coherent. The CRM database stores customer names, addresses, telephone numbers, account numbers, financial balances, transaction by channels, credit scores, other family members financial status so on and so forth. Very few banks are successful in accurately relating the customer profitability to CRM. In order for a CRM effort to be successful, the number of profitable customers has to gradually increase. To analyze customer profitability, the customer data needs to be related to cost and revenue information. A management reporting system (feed back loop) is necessary to measure the progress. Accordingly, account prospecting and customer relationship strategies have to evolve. The strategic systems architecture for banking institutions needs CRM, capacity management, customer service quality control and compliance in a single integrated service platform. The fast pace of emerging technology, institutional restructuring and mergers and acquisitions have been fragmenting technology applications. Different business functions are on many disparate and often incompatible platforms. As a result, bank errors and related costs are increasing. Service quality is suffering, as customer needs are not met in a timely manner. The confusion in complying with regulatory requirements resulting from a disjointed array of systemic implementations has uncovered the shortcomings of compartmental IT platforms. In addition, many institutions are faced with the high risk of breaches and the expense of compliance notification requirements. During recent years, retail banks have been investing in IT to comply with regulatory requirements and risk management at the expense of addressing core business service needs. For the past two decades IT technology has played an important role in process innovation and in minimizing operational inefficiencies. However, due to a fragmented focus, banks continue to have separate platforms for regulatory compliance, product development, branch management, and marketing (CRM). Combining many functions into one single platform is cost effective and reduces process time for sales and services. In addition, the confusion due to systemic redundancies is eliminated. ProductFlow's "End to End" Workflow Approach is the solution to eliminate redundancies resulting from silos. The current trend is towards investing in consolidations of fragmented IT platforms to build a firm base for supporting successful business strategies. In the process of satisfying regulatory requirements, many banks have combined certain crucial platforms using interfacing architectures. For efficient consolidations of silos and platforms, end to end workflow analysis is the essential approach. ProductFlows end to end workflow methodology is a unique tool to gain clear perspectives of the business environment and attainable goals. ProductFlows models, which provide optimal solutions to retail banking business expansion, productivity and customer service, extensively utilize an end to end workflow database to analyze existing environments. Using Product Flows end to end workflow database, which is an automated process flow database, compliance architecture can be effectively combined with other platforms to eliminate redundancies. Integrating end to end workflows with CRM works as a foundation for: Analyzing new platforms and providing effective methods of linking them to mainstream architecture, Assessing the benefits of technology, process and product innovations prior to their deployment, Providing an economical approach to complying with regulatory requirements. Utilizing the database, ProductFlow models focus on the strategic intersection of quality and productivity of product delivery systems in a tactical manner. ProductFlow consultants have proven records of connecting productivity and profitability. With the end to end workflow database, the consultants help their clients to see beyond the baseline and to achieve their short and long term objectives.

ProductFlow Consulting LLC: develops, implements, and supports retail banking productivity and profitability improvement models. ProductFlow currently markets Activity Based Branch

Staffing, QueFlow (Teller Scheduling), Activity Based Costing, Account Origination Analysis and Cost of Error. The Singular ProductFlow Database (SPFD), an end-to-end workflow database that is developed jointly by ProductFlow and Cosmic Technologies, supports its models. The superior and easy to use qualities of its products make ProductFlow a leader in the field of retail banking productivity. For more information about Product Flow, log on to www.productflow.com.
Raj Gaonkar, ProductFlow September 5, 2006