Jeffrey Kuhn, EVP of client service delivery at BNY Mellon, spoke in the morning keynote at PegaWORLD about the journey over the 230-year history of the bank towards improved customer focus. They’ve done this through a Lean/Six Sigma type of continuous process improvement (CPI) initiative: improving their processes to impact quality and efficiency, while reducing risk and improving the customer experience. But they didn’t want to just take orders and process orders faster: instead, they automate the routine work, and enable their workers to manage exceptions effectively. They’re not a retail bank, so their customers are not consumers: the customers are institutional and government investors, meaning that each customer is very high-value.
BNY Mellon has weathered recessions, depressions and financial melt-downs over the decades, but Kuhn sees the current climate as being particularly difficult: low interest rates, higher regulatory complexity and costs, and foreign investment markets that have not rebounded as much as expected. He doesn’t see this as a temporary state, however, but the new normal; they have been working to lower costs by consolidating, streamlining and automating operations in order to remain competitive, and are using Pega for much of that continuous process improvement.
Automating the routine work is only part of it, however: they also need to deal with the exceptions and the inbound customer inquiries that can’t be automated, but can be made more digital so that they can be tracked and shared. They are implementing a single inquiry platform with the goal of improving service levels, service quality and client satisfaction, which requires capturing all of the inquiries as they arrive — by paper, email and other forms — and routing them to the right team for resolution. There’s certainly a strong element of old-school imaging and workflow in this solution (begging the question why they haven’t done this decades ago), but appears to also have more modern elements of user experience, decisioning and analytics.
At the heart of this, it’s not an amazing technology story — they’ve automated straight-through processes, then implemented the less predictable processes in a BPM/case management environment — but it’s a good process improvement and change management story for how a very old organization can transform itself by embracing continuous process improvement and developing best practices. They have a two-tier model for their CPI teams that allow the best practices to flow through a centralized team to more distributed teams, allowing the distributed teams to adapt the best practices for their particular areas. More importantly, they have a company-wide shift in focus to continuous improvement: in Kuhn’s words, delighting their customers by doing what they’re good at.