In the fiercely-competitive world of banking, getting bogged down by slow client onboarding, endless emails asking for KYC details, or the frustrating search for centralized customer support can breed discontent among customers and employees and lead to substantial financial losses for the institutions involved.
So says Doug Shum, Director of Financial Services Solutions at Appian.
Shum and Aidan Reilly, Product Lead of Appian’s Solutions Innovations Group, unpacked ways to navigate these challenges at their Appian World 2023 session: Customer Lifecycle Management: How to Achieve a 360-Degree View of the Customer Experience.
Making KYC more efficient.
In customer lifecycle management (CLM), KYC screenings are frequently slowed down by manual processes and disconnected workflows across LexisNexis, NICE, Actimize, and many other crime prevention and compliance systems.
[ Want expert advice on KYC compliance strategies? Get the eBook: Powering Seamless KYC Operations. ]
Shum and Reilly highlighted how Appian tools, specifically Connected Onboarding and Connected KYC, are designed to help unify disparate data, automatically assign tasks in workflows, and provide visibility into every step of the CLM journey.
“With Appian, you can configure alerts when certain data points change for the customer,” said Reilly. “It will automatically trigger an informational alert or a KYC investigation.”
State Street used Appian to improve onboarding time by a remarkable 20% in just the first year. Bank officials reported a 30% improvement in operational efficiency. “Those are huge numbers when you think about time to revenue,” said Shum.
Equipping internal teams with the right tools.
Delivering a good CLM experience for your internal teams—the employees "in the trenches” doing the onboarding, the servicing, the KYC investigations—is just as important as delivering a good experience for customers, according to Shum.
“Studies show almost half of your employees would actually walk away if they don't have the tools they need to do their job,” he said.
Appian prioritizes employee convenience in its solution design. By allowing employees to seamlessly access data from a single source instead of navigating multiple systems, it ensures faster, more efficient workflows. Furthermore, Appian streamlines processes by providing an audit trail feature, eliminating the need for time-consuming tasks like copying and pasting information.
“You have well-documented processes, and you expect your teams to follow those processes,” Shum said. “But when you’re dealing with manual processes, it's easy for those things to get missed.”
“We have taken immense care to make sure that every action taken in our solutions is fully audited, traceable, and reportable,” said Reilly.
Scaling CLM processes and adapting for the future.
Shum and Reilly emphasized that any CLM solution needs to be resilient and easily adaptable to your organization’s needs, now and in the future.
For financial services institutions, data fabric is critical, said Reilly. “You have growth through acquisition, separate siloed systems, and you need to be able to pull that data together.” What’s more, Appian solutions are “designed to be extended,” Reilly explained. “You can pull in data from any other core systems that you need,” from information to enrich records to bidirectional communication from systems upstream or downstream of the onboarding or servicing process.
For even more convenience and scalability, Reilly added, business users can define the sequence of tasks they need for specific customers, regions, etc., and then update them without having to get their IT departments involved.
Finally, for strengthening operations as you grow, Appian is here to help, Reilly said.
“Appian enables you to have continual improvements and continual efficiency gains. Process mining isn't going to do everything for you,” he said. “It's not going to fix the problem for you. But it will help you identify in real time where those bottlenecks may arise and give you the tools to properly analyze and address the problems.”
In the world of CLM, nothing's more important than attracting and retaining satisfied customers. As fintechs and challengers offer consumers new ways to meet their banking needs, customers will choose to do business with organizations that do a better job of combining expertise and trust with digital speed and convenience. Appian’s CLM applications can be that bridge.
If you’d like to learn more about a new generation of enterprise software that can help you create a seamless customer experience from beginning to end, watch the full Appian World 2023 session: Customer Lifecycle Management: How to Achieve a 360-Degree View of the Customer Experience.
