Today's digitally driven banking environment is experiencing growing operational inefficiencies, regulatory demands, and heightened customer expectations in regional and mid-sized banks.
Therefore, striving to stay competitive while ensuring compliance and understanding how business processes function in real time is crucial. Process Mining comes into play here, enabling us to better understand and leverage these complicated processes.
To someone introduced to Process Mining, it is a powerful analytical technique that allows organizations to visualize, analyze, and optimize their end-to-end workflows. By leveraging existing data from various systems (such as ERP, CRM, or core banking systems), process mining reconstructs a real-time picture of process execution. This enables businesses to discover bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and deviations from standard procedures.
While process mining focuses on analyzing the entire process landscape, Task Mining drills down to individual tasks.
What is Task Mining?
To identify micro-level inefficiencies, task mining involves capturing and analyzing user interactions with various systems, such as keystrokes, clicks, and document handling. By recording user actions, task mining tools provide detailed insights into how manual tasks are performed and where automation could streamline operations. It’s handy for identifying repetitive, time-consuming tasks that drain employee productivity.
Difference Between Process Mining and Task Mining
Both process and task mining are valuable tools for understanding and optimizing workflows, but they serve different purposes and are suited to other use cases.
- Process Mining is ideal for organizations looking to optimize end-to-end processes. It’s well-suited for analyzing workflows such as customer onboarding, loan approvals, and compliance management, where the entire chain of actions from different departments or systems needs to be evaluated. Process mining gives banks a high-level view, helping them identify inefficiencies, process delays, and areas for improvement.
- Task Mining is better suited for identifying inefficiencies at the individual task level. It’s beneficial for banks to look to improve productivity in repetitive tasks such as data entry, report generation, and document processing. Task mining enables the identification of micro-level bottlenecks, offering insights into where robotic process automation (RPA) can be deployed to free up human resources.
In practice, the best approach is often to use both methods. While process mining provides a macro-level view of inefficiencies, task mining offers micro-level details that help banks fine-tune specific tasks. Combining both approaches ensures that inefficiencies are addressed at the process and task levels, leading to a more holistic improvement in operations.
Tech-Led Process Assessment by Coforge
Coforge's tech-led process assessment approach, governed by our proprietary framework ‘ProcessGym’, along with domain experts and Six Sigma Practitioners on top of industry-leading process mining & task mining solutions, offers a more efficient and accurate alternative.
Coforge's tech-led assessment solution provides data-backed insights, enabling banks to understand how processes function in real time, pinpoint inefficiencies, and redesign workflows for maximum efficiency. Our domain experts and Six Sigma practitioners then work with the banks to build ‘future-state’ processes that are aligned with organizational goals and create an optimal implementation roadmap.
How Banks Can Benefit from the Tech-led Process Assessment
Our Tech-led Process Assessment can unlock significant benefits for banks: enhanced process efficiency, reduced risk exposure, improved customer experience, and improved ROI from RPA initiatives. These benefits are interconnected, and together they can drive a bank’s transformation toward becoming a more agile and customer-centric organization.
- Enhanced Efficiency
One key advantage of process assessment is its ability to optimize operational efficiency. As discussed in previous blogs, inefficiencies stem from legacy systems, siloed operations, and manual workflows for many banks. By mapping out how these processes function in real time, process assessment identifies bottlenecks, redundant steps, and unnecessary delays that slow down service delivery.
For example, many regional banks still rely on outdated processes for loan approvals, customer onboarding, and compliance reporting, leading to longer turnaround times. As outlined in ‘What’s driving inefficiency in your Bank?’, banks can streamline workflows, reduce manual interventions, and standardize operations across departments by using process assessment. This improves the speed and accuracy of internal processes and leads to significant cost savings by reducing time spent on non-value-adding tasks.
- Reduced Risk Exposure
Another critical benefit of process assessment is its ability to identify and mitigate risks. Compliance and risk management are paramount in financial institutions, especially with the rising complexity of regulations such as Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. Inefficient or incomplete processes can lead to compliance breaches, fines, and reputational damage.
As outlined in our "Minimize Your Risk Exposure by Identifying Points of Failure" blog, process assessment provides banks with detailed insights into their workflows, helping them identify points of failure before they result in costly errors. For instance, if specific steps in the transaction monitoring process are prone to delays or manual errors, process assessment can highlight these weak points and suggest ways to fix them, such as through automation or better workflow design.
By proactively addressing these risks, banks can minimize the likelihood of regulatory breaches and enhance their ability to comply with evolving standards. This reduces the chance of facing penalties, which cost U.S. banks over $10.4 billion in AML-related fines in 2021 alone.
- Enhanced Customer Experience
Improving customer experience is a strategic priority for banks, and process assessment is crucial. Customers today expect seamless, personalized, and digital-first banking experiences, whether opening an account, applying for a loan, or resolving a query. However, many banks struggle to deliver an optimal level of service due to inefficiencies in their internal processes.
As discussed in the "Enhance the Banking Experience for Your Customers" whitepaper, process assessment allows banks to pinpoint friction points in customer-facing processes. For example, unsatisfactory customer support interactions often stem from internal inefficiencies. By mapping these processes and identifying bottlenecks, banks can re-engineer their workflows to deliver faster, more efficient services.
Moreover, process assessment helps banks ensure their operations align with customer expectations. It highlights areas where automation and digital tools can enhance service delivery, such as automating routine customer support requests with AI-powered chatbots or empowering the customer-agent relationship with an up-to-date history of customer interactions across all channels (chat, email, call, etc.). This leads to a more seamless customer journey, resulting in increased satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, profitability.
- Improved ROI from RPA initiatives
Many banks struggle with RPA implementation or fail to recognize the expected ROI from their RPA initiatives. While RPA can automate specific tasks, it does not inherently fix broken processes. One common issue arises when RPA is applied to processes that have not been re-engineered or optimized for automation.
For instance, if a bank uses RPA to automate a loan approval process that involves redundant steps or manual data entry, the automation may work in the short term. Still, it will ultimately be limited by the inefficiencies baked into the process. This can lead to a situation where the RPA implementation fails to deliver the expected results, with bots unable to handle exceptions, high error rates, and increased maintenance costs
Coforge’s Tech-Led Process Assessment to Gain Edge
While process and task mining are valuable tools for identifying inefficiencies, how these assessments are conducted can significantly impact the outcomes. Traditional manual process assessments are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Manual assessments often rely on stakeholder interviews and documentation reviews, which can be subjective and miss critical inefficiencies in complex processes.
The Limitations of Manual Process Assessments
Manual process assessments typically involve:
- Extensive documentation reviews
- Stakeholder interviews
- Workflow mapping exercises. While these assessments can provide useful insights, they are often slowed down by fragmented information gathering, require significant human effort, and can lead to fatigue and errors. This approach makes it difficult for banks to identify areas for improvement and delays necessary operational enhancements quickly.
Key Benefits of Coforge’s Tech-Led Process Assessment:
- Speed: Tech-led assessments dramatically reduce the time required to assess processes. What would take weeks or months in a manual assessment can be accomplished in a matter of days with automated tools.
- Accuracy: By leveraging process mining and task mining tools, Coforge provides a clear, objective view of process execution. This reduces the risk of human bias and ensures hidden inefficiencies are uncovered.
- Actionable Insights: The combination of data analytics and AI allows Coforge to provide actionable recommendations for process improvement. Whether eliminating bottlenecks, automating manual tasks, or streamlining customer interactions, Coforge’s assessments result in measurable improvements in efficiency, customer experience, and compliance.
- Customized Solutions: Coforge’s team of six-sigma practitioners and domain experts works closely with you to tailor the assessment to your specific needs. This ensures that the solutions proposed are not generic but designed to address your organization's unique challenges.
Conclusion
Addressing inefficiencies in processes and workflows is crucial for regional and mid-sized banks looking to stay competitive in today’s digital-first financial landscape. By leveraging process mining and task mining, banks can gain a detailed understanding of how their operations function in real time, identify bottlenecks, and redesign workflows to be leaner, faster, and more customer-centric.
However, the key to unlocking the full potential of these tools lies in how the assessment is conducted. Coforge’s tech-led process assessment offers banks a more efficient, accurate, and impactful way to improve process efficiencies, ROI from RPA & AI initiatives, minimize risk, and enhance customer experience. By partnering with Coforge, banks can embark on a transformation journey that leads to long-term success and sustainability.
Start your transformation today—click here for a FREE Diagnosis where Coforge will provide proof-of-concept solutions to help your bank thrive in the competitive financial landscape.
