Citibank Brazil provides banking services and products, insurance, loans, credit cards, and investment products to the commercial banking market, with a focus on medium- to large-sized businesses. In this highly competitive market, it’s critical to move quickly to meet customer demands. After experiencing significant customer churn, Citibank Brazil knew they needed to make big changes to their operations.
Simplify Big Business Problems with the Right Tools
With their “Banco PJ” project, Citibank Brazil set out to develop a better understanding of how and where their business processes were broken. At the heart of the project, they implemented a business process management (BPM) solution that accurately modeled their entire loan application process, and quickly identified that account opening was the most critical activity affecting customer retention and experience.
They found that there were more than 300 operations that spanned multiple departments that had to occur before an account could be opened. The process was almost entirely manual, paper-based, and riddled with small errors (data entry errors, duplications, lack of communication). While the issues appeared small, they accumulated to result in long delays and a loss of prospective customers.
The bank first reworked, and then automated, their mission-critical account opening process. They integrated their business silos and deployed an electronic content management system (CMS). Within months, they reduced cycle times on account opening by 70%, but more importantly they laid a foundation that allows for monitoring and continuous improvement of their business.
You Cannot Improve What You Can’t Measure
Citibank’s process improvement team went into the project with the mantra, “We cannot improve what we cannot measure.” Excel spreadsheets were inflexible and did not provide useful, real-time data. Staying true to their mantra, real-time dashboards were created for leaders across the business. Using TIBCO Spotfire, they now have access to real-time, relevant information that can be easily consumed and expanded to their needs. Today, sales managers can see that sales force productivity has increased 50%, and process owners can see that rejection levels are down 58%.
