Challenge — There is no objective more important to banks and other financial services institutions than the acquisition of new customers. Unfortunately, new-account opening is one of the most fragmented, inefficient processes with which most of these organizations are saddled today. These inefficient, duplicative processes translate to high rates of application abandonment and lackluster results in account funding and activation — all of which lead to “churn” and loss of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Why Have Account-Opening Challenges Not Been Solved?
Given the importance of new customers to financial services institutions, it is surprising, at first blush, that the technical and process hurdles associated with account opening have not been overcome until now. These challenges, however, are not easily solved by conventional approaches:

Interaction of people, systems, content, and rules — Rigid legacy systems cannot easily manage multi-step processes, featuring manual paperwork, the inputting of data into multiple IT systems, and the gathering of credit and compliance information from third-party agencies — together with typical "accept/reject/refer" decision-making procedures.
Case management — In today’s account-opening applications, with business processes spanning multiple, complex, “siloed” IT systems, it often happens that the (self-service Web) customer or the customer service agent loses track of the current state of the new business process. These situations are inevitably frustrating for customers. What’s more, there is often no cost-effective way to handle exceptions outside the standard process without time-consuming, error-prone manual intervention.
Consistency across channels — Hard-coded legacy technologies, which fail to make use of service-oriented architecture (SOA), cannot re-use application services in order to adapt quickly to business and competitive requirements. These legacy systems are also incapable of natively supporting multiple delivery channels (e.g., branch office, call center, Web). These shortcomings result in the need to continually develop and roll out ever more-specialized (and “brittle”) technologies to fill the widening gaps between organizational needs and technical capabilities.

Pegasystems SmartBPM® Solution
The Pegasystems business process management (BPM) solution, the SmartBPM Suite, is the key to dramatically improving the account-opening process — driving down labor costs, improving the overall customer experience, and building account-holder loyalty.

Interaction of People, Systems, and Content: Automating Decisions and Processes
Pegasystems' account-opening solution does more than route applications through the organization — it automates many processes and actually completes work for the human participants. SmartBPM incorporates the best practices of the business into rules and processes that drive work to completion. For example, instead of waiting for an operator to review an application, an OFAC service, and a credit report, the solution intelligently automates the process: assembling data from back-end and third-party systems, then making decisions based on pre-defined business rules about an applicant’s viability. If the business rules are validated, the system proceeds to set up the account — providing true straight-through processing (STP), from beginning to end. If the business rules call the applicant’s identity or validity into question, the system determines the next appropriate step: referral to a bank employee for manual review, or flat-out rejection of the application. Only Pegasystems effectively integrates people, processes, and content into such a unified, working system.

Case Management: Cross-Selling and the Customer Experience
By embedding banking and financial services business practices and policies into the system, Pegasystems’ account-opening solution helps ensure a better customer experience and more effective cross-sell capabilities for agents. Pegasystems SmartBPM actively guides staff members during customer interactions and processing, facilitating real-time product configuration. The SmartBPM solution also prompts for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on the customer’s profile, demographics, and other criteria. And since all customer-facing channels (e.g., branch, call center, Web) employ a single set of shared automated processes and a single case-management repository, customers and employees never get “lost” during account setup, regardless of channel. Web users abandoning an online application, for example, can dial the call center, and the customer service representative can pick up the process where the customer left off, finishing the application without a moment’s re-work. What’s more, SmartBPM case management provides for robust exception-handling processes that dramatically reduce the costs associated with exception processing.

Process Re-Use and Specialization: Changing Course — in Days…
Pegasystems’ SOA-enabled SmartBPM makes the enterprise more agile — permitting business and IT users to rapidly and easily modify business rules and processes to adapt and respond to competitive and market changes. Because the system is driven by business rules that can be tailored with ease at any time, a bank or other financial services institution can implement new products in days or even hours, instead of the weeks and months required by a workflow-only solution or other traditional development approach. Furthermore, using standard business tools like spreadsheets and Web forms, a business analyst can effect changes to business policy or workflow, freeing up IT staff members for more sophisticated work.

Solutions In Action


Account Openings Surge With BPM	New Tools Enhance CRM Operations	BPM System Serves 26 Countries	Compliance and Fraud System Cuts Losses
Swiss Bank Ups Close Rate	CRM and Fulfillment in Five Months	Enterprise Backbone Saves $10 Million	Government Agency Improves Services
Automated Approvals Cut Risk	Bank Gets One Stop Service	BPM System Speeds Set Up	Better Tools Cut Losses
Bank BPM in 90 Days	Solution Delights Customers	New Backbone Halves Labor Costs	Investigator Effectiveness up 40%