Capital One specializes in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts. Headquartered in Tysons, Virginia, it is a finance leader and high-street name in the United States, Canada, and the UK. For this direct bank, credit card issuer, and auto loan originator with over 100 million customers and 50,000 associates, risk management is a regulatory requirement and a strategic imperative for the business.
In 2014, the company embarked on a journey to revolutionize its risk management framework, driven by the capabilities of cloud computing. By 2016, Capital One became the first bank to declare a full migration to the cloud, and by 2020, it had exited all of its data centers, embracing a tech-forward identity.
As Sean Webb, product manager at Capital One, explained during their presentation at CamundaCon NYC 2024, managing risk is a crucial best practice for any financial organization, but it is especially so for an organization so large and in such a highly regulated field.
Risk management involves identifying, evaluating, and mitigating threats to an organization’s finances, earnings, and operations arising from financial, legal, technological, strategic, accidental, or natural risks. It aims to address the full spectrum of potential risks and their interconnected effects on an organization’s strategic objectives.
As you can imagine, it is a discipline of dependencies, contingencies, automated and manual processes, compliance and regulatory requirements, stimulus and response, and constant vigilance. As Sean noted, risk management is often decentralized across an entire company, and centralizing it has benefits and challenges.
Choosing Camunda
Senthilkumar Manokaran, application architect and master software engineer at Capital One, spoke about the best-in-class requirements critical for a risk management platform. The organization had very specific requirements around process and task management, decision management, optimization capabilities, multi-tenancy, and more. They looked to see if anything in the market already met these requirements, and found Camunda.
Central to Capital One’s modernization was the integration of Camunda’s process and decision automation tool, Modeler. This tool enabled the risk management team to centralize their workflows and decision-making processes, establishing a unified language across diverse teams, from assessors to auditors. This shift was not merely about technology but also about culture and practice. Their presentation cites how Capital One’s journey highlights the importance of a shared responsibility model—a collaboration between a central platform team and various tenant teams who could independently build and deploy their processes, leveraging the innate benefits of Camunda Modeler.
The central team became a hub of expertise, offering guidance, templates, and best practices to ensure consistency and efficiency across the organization. This model facilitated rapid scaling, reduced latency, and helped maintain a coherent experience throughout the organization’s risk management activities.
Leveraging process orchestration
Capital One’s process orchestration journey started with building out core risk management activities within the application stack. The company then centralized these processes and rules for faster, uniform decisions. This approach meant that the organization could respond more quickly to change, with the benefit of associates focusing more on risk management instead of the logistics and administration surrounding that management.
During their presentation Q&A, Sean highlighted the ongoing benefits of Camunda Modeler: “It’s great that we can directly collaborate on the model itself, live, and adjust these things quickly. We’ve had testing sessions where we’re testing our product, and we find rules that aren’t functioning the way that we thought they would, then made the change in the DMN table so quickly that we had it fixed by the end of the testing session. Then we’re able to retest it, right there!”
The benefits of modernization
“Our tech and business effectiveness improved after automating our processes using Camunda. Increased business value, speed to market, and tech efficiency. Overall cost reduction. Plus, using Camunda greatly reduced the need for custom code, decreased infrastructure costs, and streamlined compliance with non-functional requirements.”
– Sean Webb, Product Manager, Capital One
The benefits of Capital One’s modernization were manifold. There was a notable increase in speed to market, with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams becoming tools for collaboration between business, product, and tech teams. Citing significant ROI, this collaboration allowed for live model adjustments, significantly reducing the time from design to implementation.
“We noticed an instant increase in our speed to market as we started to use Camunda. And it reduces cost as well—infrastructure-wise. Now, it’s consolidated. It’s sitting in a serverless tech stack, which greatly saves our infrastructure maintenance costs.”
– Senthilkumar Manokaran, Master Software Engineer, Capital One
Challenges and lessons learned
The journey was not without its challenges. The team learned the importance of establishing templates and standards for process models to avoid discrepancies. In their presentation they recognize the need for thorough documentation, which grew to be extensive enough to enable self-service for tenant teams. Data retention policies were implemented to manage the accumulation of data, and the team continuously adapted to new changes, setting best practices along the way.
Looking to tomorrow
Capital One’s journey in risk management modernization showcases an inspiring and successful blend of technological innovation and strategic planning. In their CamundaCon NYC presentation, Sean and Senthilkumar discuss how, by leveraging Camunda’s platform, the company not only enhanced its efficiency and agility but also fostered a culture of collaboration and continuous learning.
As they look to the future, with AI-powered automation and integration on the horizon, Capital One continues to solidify its stance as “a technology company that is also a bank,” setting a precedent and trend for the financial industry at large.
Please watch their CamundaCon presentation for more details on this project, and check out some of the other presentations from CamundaCon New York City 2024 for more invaluable real-world insights from the process orchestration trenches.
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