Banks Need To Optimise and Control Processes and Storage of Documents

23 July 2010

Increasing regulatory requirements, including the upcoming introduction of the Consumer Protection Act, is making it more important than ever for South Africa’s banks to focus on business process management and enterprise content management initiatives to optimise and control their processes and storage of all forms of content such as documents and e-mails.

This is the view of Marius Mare, director in charge of consulting at Johannesburg-based business performance improvement specialist Ovations, which consults widely in the banking and financial services industries.

Over the past few years, he says, document management has become a major logistical, technological and cost issue for banks, a reality which has sparked a major drive towards digitisation of content by all of the country’s major banks.

“Without doubt, the introduction of the Consumer Protection Act is going to require banks to have far better view of all customer related activities, placing more emphasis on process control, content management and staff training. This will include the tracking and handling of potential complaints from consumers,” he says.

“The growing emphasis on regulatory compliance therefore means that banks will need to have more control over all their end-to-end processes, enabling them to retain and utilise valuable intellectual property in a highly competitive and service-oriented environment.”

According to Mare, it has become essential for banks to have a “single view” of their customers. This avoids costly and time-consuming duplication – especially when it comes to requests for documentation - promotes better servicing of customers’ needs and enhances the understanding of potential lending risks.

“It has become vital for banks to treat their processes as assets and for intellectual property to be encapsulated into processes so that this is not lost when staff members leave the organisation,” adds Mare.

In addition, he stresses that under the Consumer Protection Act, consumers will be able to opt out from direct marketing initiatives, forcing banks to come up with other ways of cross-selling their products and services. He believes that one way of achieving this is by optimising each customer interaction by empowering staff with the necessary information.

“Banks need to be more agile than ever before and they can only really achieve this by employing the most suitable business processes. Deploying service oriented architectures can assist them to adapt swiftly to change and become more innovative,” says Mare.

* This article appeared in Business Day’s “Banking in SA” feature on July 23, 2010

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