In an industry where perpetual improvement is required to satisfy shareholder demand, financial services is undergoing a paradigm shift of sorts. Increasingly, more emphasis is being placed on business optimisation (BO) as opposed to traditional transaction processing.
And at the core of BO lies the next step in the evolution of business process management (BPM). It is moving beyond automating processes and boosting efficiency to gaining an important business intelligence (BI) edge, if you will, driving the customer experience while also increasing business value.
Indeed, financial services has more than ever become reliant on technology that not only automates their processes but also provides them insight into performance areas and issues that in turn improve profits.
"If you talk to business people, they agree that it`s not about improving processes but providing the right information, to the right people in the right timeframe. The challenge here, therefore, is to get the accurate information quickly and to present it in the best possible manner," comments David McWilliam, managing director of Cognos SA, an IBM company.
"Furthermore, organisations don`t want the information in raw format but rather guided analysis in the right format," he adds.
This is where BO steps to the fore. "In a business optimised environment, BPM coupled with business intelligence automates processes, providing the right content while adding that next important level of intelligence to the decision-making process," he explains.
With BPM and BI, process metrics and business result can be visualised, and importantly, transactions can be turned into decisions which in turn lead to BO. Indeed, by combining BPM and BI, the information is getting into the hands of people who can use it at the time that is most relevant to making a good business decision.
Analysts also believe by combining BI with BPM it will provide a more natural, dynamic computing environment.
Compliance has also led to an increasing reliance on effective BO in the banking industry, dictated by frameworks such as Basel II.
"Organisations should not see compliance as a burden but rather as a means to ensure that each project has a business optimisation aspect.
"As opposed to just reporting on risk, why not understand and manage it better with the help of entrenched business optimisation driven by BPM and BI," adds McWilliam.
Clearly, BO - realised by the combined strengths of BPM and BI - is set to take the financial services industry well beyond a transaction-based environment to delivering the right information to the right decision-makers.
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