The Customer:

A leading African bank:

	formed through an amalgamation of banks and institutions across countries in Southern Africa,
	with operations spread across six countries, each having its own currency,
	offering a wide range of products and services, including treasury, investment banking, unit trusts and corporate finance, and
	catering to the needs of corporates, high-net-worth individuals and other retail clients. The bank has an impressive list of shareholders, including an European government, a major multinational bank (headquartered in Luxembourg) and an international financing body (headquartered in Washington D.C., USA)

The Challenge:

The strategy of amalgamations and acquisitions was pursued with the aim of reaching out to clients on a pan-African basis. The growth pattern brought in its wake a number of challenges, which required:

	consolidation of disparate and antiquated systems, thereby eliminating the need to have specialized skills to use each of the legacy systems
	setting up of uniform processes across operating units
	improving data gathering processes to avoid delay and, also, build accuracy and reliability
	reducing operating costs
	improvement of controls to track customer exposures - preventing revenue leakage
	building a robust MIS system to support effective operational and strategic decisions

The i-flex team conducted an exhaustive survey of the bank's position, its internal processes and the linkages in the banking chain. It compared the bank's position with various international benchmarks and observed the areas for improvement. While making the recommendations, the team was driven by the objectives of increasing the efficiency of the bank's current processes, improving customer response time, ensuring transaction safety, increasing profitability, removing existing process dysfunctions and bottlenecks, filling in missing links, identifying new opportunities to better serve and achieve more sophisticated customer segregation, identifying new technological initiatives necessary, and aligning present and future process flows with the bank's overall strategic goals. The benefits and costs of centralization and disaggregated processing were also considered while formulating the recommendations.

Some of the broad recommendations made include:

	introduction of revised and standardized process flows across the bank's multi-country locations
	dis-aggregated and centralized process models based on the area of activity
	segmentation of customer profile
	organizational restructuring to suit the re-engineered workflows
	adopting relevant credit appraisal and management techniques suitable to the environment with an eye to improving controls for better risk management
	new processes leading to better cost control and increased business scope
	adopting relevant valuation and allocation methodology
	restructuring human resources and general services functions
	redesigned branch/office layout suitable for improved customer service

Customer Benefits

The intensive exercise of redesigning processes helped the bank to improve its ability to service customers and make its presence felt in the African region, besides improving control and profitability.
Some of the benefits gained from the exercise were as follows:

	ability to expand in the regions without making a sizeable enhancement to the operation setup
	center-wise segregation of responsibilities duly aligned to the strategic focus of the bank in the respective area
	improved customer profiling and segmentation for better customer focus
	improved process documentation
	introduction of best industry practices and a foundation for redesigned banking operations in alignment with the upgraded technology platform to be implemented at the bank
	setting up of a management information system in line with the requirements of the business strategy in focus
	creation of a framework for enhancing products/lines of business
	increased customer satisfaction - assured and timely delivery of services
	scientific and well-laid-out processes for credit appraisal and monitoring
	cross-LOB skill development
	standardization and automation of processing

Change Management

In view of the complexity of the recommendations, the bank felt that a strong and committed team was essential to ensure that the recommendations were absorbed across the organization, in letter and spirit. The bank felt that the rollout should happen under the guidance of the i-flex team and that i-flex methodology should be used as it was well suited to ensure smooth implementation of organizational changes and process recommendations. By adopting a well-considered methodology, the implementation was found to be faster and more effective, and better commitment was obtained across the levels. The methodology emphasized building of predictive models through which likely resistance points were identified in advance along with better impact analysis of implementation steps. The bank gained in terms of:

	usage of wider participatory techniques
	special focus on training as a means of communicating the bank's objectives and obtaining commitment, besides skills buildup
	close monitoring of the implementation program with clearly laid down milestones and targets to guard against slip up in observance of time lines