Process Mining and Process Discovery in Financial Services

With great technology comes great responsibility.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seen as being a critical part of the fintech space in terms of collecting, analysing, and safeguarding transactions while streamlining processes and yet, the application of such automated data practices in financial services continues to be a much-debated topic in terms of management, security, regulation, and associated compliance.

From regulatory changes to mergers and acquisitions, competition from new entrants, and the ongoing fight to differentiate their offerings, Financial Institutions (FIs) have much on their plates.

As a result, figuring out what business processes should be improved is no easy feat.

The key here is not to place a sticky plaster over something that is no longer fit for purpose.

Business leaders need business processes that support their digital transformation initiatives in the long term.

Celonis estimate that companies annually lose 20-30% of revenue unaware of poorly executed processes within their organizations.

While newer, customer-facing processes are introduced to impress the market, back-end legacy processes may also be just as ripe for ‘simple’ improvement or full automation at the other end of the spectrum.

The first step organisations need to take towards such operational efficiencies is simple: use a process mining tool to gain a holistic view of automation opportunities.

Gartner refers to process mining as “the art of discovering, monitoring and improving processes to increase operational resilience”.

Such process mining technology delivers the invaluable insights needed to eliminate process inefficiencies, drive digital transformation and in short, achieve improved business results.

Mindful that a large FI can have five hundred processes or more, Process Control and Optimisation (PCO) tools can help such companies make business processes more efficient, and fast and increase overall productivity.

Such process mining tools play a key role in deciding what to automate and how; by analysing the processes – singularly or, as a set of processes - that they want to automate.

Process mining can help identify promising candidates for change.

According to Gartner, one in four businesses actively use process mining together with simulation modelling to achieve continuous improvement, a near-constant transformation strategy that keeps businesses in their most lean and productive states.

Only when business leaders understand their process inefficiencies, can they invest in the right digitisation activities.

Although Deloitte has suggested that the post-pandemic bank will emerge different from the one that went in, the news channels all carry daily updates on the need for all businesses – large and small - to adopt a more agile mindset regarding future change.

They forecast that banks will need to continue to focus on improving the digitisation of their operations, remain flexible to new business models, and put their customers at the heart of their digital strategy.

The pandemic has only accelerated the industry growth, the sub-sectors of the Financial Services industry - Fintech (Financial Technology), InsurTech (Insurance Technology), and PropTech (Property Technology) - all continue to grow at an incredible rate.

According to data collected by the market research company Toptal Finance, the global fintech market was worth $127.66bn in 2018, with a predicted annual growth rate of 25% until 2022, to $309.98 bn.

FIs continue to look for ways to automate time-consuming manual processes.

FIs want to extract and prepare the data from existing process flows, for visualisation and analysis.

FIs need help to unlock actionable insights faster and more effectively than ever before.

Due to the wealth of data already stored in most financial institutions, there is an opportunity for leading software businesses like BOXARR to build on the past successes of incumbent or legacy process mining solutions.

Driven by the sheer volume of records and documents retained, FIs are increasingly motivated to leverage emerging technologies to exploit their data in new ways, as they aim to revolutionise processes and overhaul customer experiences.

BOXARR brings a fresh and innovative solution to the modelling, visualisation, and analyses of process-mining data sets.

Rather than ploughing through massive and impenetrable spreadsheets, BOXARR ingests the data and enables process flows and associated metrics to be visualised and filtered through a range of configurable Contexts – e.g., by Process, by Department, by Location, by Handler, etc.

BOXARR’s immense flexibility enables organisations to use BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) or configure formats and ontologies which make sense to them or the specific use case.

Functional analytics can then be applied to the model(s); surfacing KPIs and enabling managers and analysts to reveal performance issues, risks, and bottlenecks; and to discover opportunities for improvement.

The impacts of proposed process changes can then be played out in scenarios, helping organisations to understand the most effective transformation paths to continuous improvement.

If you want to know more, hello@boxarr.com