Commercial banking is part of the corporate portfolio and comprises customers who have complex needs and utilise a range of solutions such as transactional products, commercial property finance, trade finance, foreign exchange, require vehicle asset finance and are also expanding their businesses into Africa. The bank has therefore decided to align the commercial banking customer experience to that of their corporate and investment banking division – which would require a significant transformation effort from a people, process and technology perspective.

Legacy systems have long been a challenge in the banking environment and coupled with the siloed approach taken by different areas within the banks, have meant that many banks don’t have a complete and single view of each customer. Customer experiences at the client were not being matched by what the customers needed i.e. not fit-for-purpose. Underlying legacy constraints, processes and technology were hampering customers being correctly identified across all bank platforms, resulting in complicated matching and analysis to uniquely identify the customer.

Facts revealed during BSG’s research at the bank showcased the need for a single customer view included:

• Multiple customer profiles for legal entities due to lack of application level validation
• Poor quality of customer identification information such as registration numbers and registered names
• Product platforms creating new customer profiles for existing customer due to poor governance historically
• Inconsistent compliance status and compliance rules across different divisions
• Non-standard data standards for customer data across different divisions
• Customer profiles that are not being actively managed by the channel
• Customer migrations being incomplete due to data quality

The bank didn’t have a clear method to identify a commercial banking customer.  BSG was asked to assist the bank in implementing an integrated solution to uniquely identify the commercial banking customers across the entire organisation, multiples systems and platforms and address many of the current issues resulting from not having a complete view of a customer.

BSG supported and managed the client’s data clean-up and created a single customer profile per legal entity, creating mechanisms to uniquely identify a customer regardless of which division of the bank they fall within or who manages the customer relationship.  Further aspects of BSG’s work included operational improvements and embedding the required operational model to streamline business.  A key element of the project was customer management, portfolio streamlining and automating customer onboarding.

A regional manager involved in the first business rollout reported on significant time savings resulting from the complete view of customers through the new sales pipeline dashboard, with this real-time view of a customer being key in the highly competitive financial sector.