Client:
The Client of the project was a large international bank that offers services in the field of daily banking, personal accounts and credit cards, savings and loans, as well as in the fields of leasing, investment and insurance. The bank has an extensive network of its own branches and partner outlets throughout Europe and is considered to be one of the most innovative banks in Poland, very advanced in electronic banking.
Automation of Insurance and Loan Service Processes
PROJECT CHALLENGES
Due to the decision to migrate from a silo architecture to a service architecture with ‘Profile’ as the central system, a necessity arose to transfer the back office processes to a new system. As the new system did not have ready-made solutions to provide comprehensive support for these processes, it was decided to automate them using WebMethods BPMS – a technology that the Client already had in their infrastructure and which met their expectations. A number of processes were automated as a part of the project, including insurance claims handling, resignations from insurance, loans restructurings and changing the interest rate of a target loan due to fulfillment of its purpose.
KEY BENEFITS
From the beginning of the project, IT analysts from Inteca worked closely with target users, i.e. people who deal with the processes covered by the project on a daily basis. Thanks to this cooperation, the processes have been designed to simplify the work of target users as much as possible and to automate as many activities as possible.
Users were relieved thanks to such functionalities as the automatic terminating of applications after their expiration (about which the user is informed by e-mail), or the automatic generation of all required documents. They do not need to search for information across different systems – all information needed to make decisions by the operator is collected from the central bank system using the SOA service
layer, and displayed on the user’s screen. SOA services are also used to protect the process from user errors. Thanks to implemented business rules and validations (such as automatic checking of account status, in order to confirm whether a loan linked to an account can be restructured or whether an insurance claim can be made), the risk of human error has been minimized.
The user interface has also been designed in cooperation with target users, making it clear and intuitive. Team leaders, on the other hand, have gained the possibility of assigning specific users to process instances and monitoring their progress in handling applications, which facilitates managing resources and verifying decisions made by employees.
THE KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE BANK
Traditional IT architecture brings complications related to the fact that data are located in different systems and are not integrated. Users need to work with many applications to perform their activities because they need the system’s specific functionalities. Because of this, the so-called business silos arise, which hinder the exchange of information and thus process optimization. Thanks to the implementation of SOA / APIs service architecture, data becomes a shared resource of the organization, and access to functionalities of existing and newly-built systems becomes easy and common. This is the basis for constructing automated business processes that, while working on the BPM platform, coordinate data exchange and business transactions, and allow for monitoring and process analytics in real-time. This is the key to building real digital businesses.
THE SOLUTION
As part of the solution, automation of each of the processes was designed and implemented. WebMethods BPMS technology was chosen because it enables rapid development of software used to automate processes and supports many business aspects of such automation. Important features of WebMethods BPMS are easy assigning business roles to users, monitoring the effectiveness of users in the process and the ability to quickly change the business rules used in the process. The user interface has been implemented using a website design technique called Responsive Web Design, so that its appearance automatically adjusts to the size of the browser window, and hence to various devices (e.g. computer, smartphone, tablet).
Due to the application of SOA architecture in the customer’s company, the implemented processes communicated with the bank’s systems using SOA service layer. As a result, WebMethods BPMS processes can be initiated by other applications, and the processes themselves have established communication with the central system and the Client’s directory. Thanks to this, the user can read and update data on various systems, generate relevant documents and send them to the print queue, without having to use multiple applications separately.