A smooth and friction-free customer experience is essential to capture and maintain clientele. With a slew of alternatives out there, a prospect should feel that their onboarding and general service meets their expectations and addresses their concerns.
Staying ahead of the curve and providing customers with a smooth banking experience, plus adhering to regulatory standards and best practices, isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a critical necessity expected by modern customers.
Process orchestration is crucial for banking services—it streamlines operations, can greatly enhance the customer experience, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and accelerates the delivery of financial products to market with outstanding ROI.
96% of IT professionals consider process automation to be essential to digital transformation, and Rabobank, the leading Dutch multinational bank, recognized this imperative.
They found themselves struggling with slow process optimization and rigid systems due to frontend embedded process logic. This resulted in inefficiencies in sales and customer onboarding, as well as challenges in meeting regulatory demands. To address these issues and modernize its legacy systems, Rabobank recently implemented Camunda 8 SaaS for smarter automation orchestration.
To talk to us about their journey, Rabobank business analyst Pascal van Puijvelde and IT lead Louwris Wernink joined us at CamundaCon NYC 2024.
In their presentation, they talk about how the IT team grappled with slow production times , under their old system, its rigid processes, and the misalignment between business and IT. This impacted their ability to run sales and customer onboarding processes efficiently and to adhere to essential regulatory requirements. Pascal and Louwris spoke to us about their adoption of Camunda 8 as a result of their need to orchestrate automation intelligently, and to modernize legacy systems. They explained how SaaS is the right answer for them to set up their team for success while complying with banking regulations.
The genesis of change
With a legacy system that was becoming increasingly obsolete, Rabobank faced the challenge of revamping its IT infrastructure to improve efficiency and reduce loan approval times.
After careful consideration of various platforms, including Mendix, Pega, and serverless options, Rabobank chose Camunda for its agility, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities.
Strategic implementation
Rabobank managed the implementation of Camunda by providing customized training for various roles, establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) for ongoing support and best practices sharing, and conducting regular meetings to address challenges. Additionally, they promoted incremental learning and utilized technical account managers from Camunda for expert advice, ensuring a well-supported transition for all team members.
The bank worked closely with Camunda’s dedicated technical account managers (TAMs) to refine its initial designs and overcome process modeling challenges, to centralize knowledge, to share best practices, and to foster innovation.
“There is a lot of interest across the business. We have an internal Rabobank community around Camunda, which is starting to grow. We really don’t have to sell it internally. There is a lot of discovery going on, and the need for orchestration is out there.”
–Louwris Wernink, IT Lead, Rabobank
A comprehensive training sprint was also conducted across multiple roles within the organization to ensure smooth adoption and enablement of the new platform.
“Having a BPMN approach gives us more insight into business requirements in an earlier stage, but also where the complexity is where we need some more fine-grained details on requirements. You get closer to the actual complexity that you have to build.”
– Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank
Navigating challenges with finesse
Adhering to stringent banking regulations, the Rabobank team talked about how they negotiated SLAs and ensured data security and privacy were uncompromised during the transition to Camunda.
The bank developed a structured approach to manage the increase of information during the implementation phase, ensuring that each team member was adequately trained and supported and received the support needed to adapt to the new system.
The SaaS solution has allowed Rabobank to focus on enhancing customer experiences rather than infrastructure administration.
“For quite some time, SaaS has been the favorite solution for us. We want to focus on the fun stuff, and that for us is creating that customer experience and not running a Kubernetes cluster. Do what you’re good at—leave the rest to Camunda.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank
The road ahead
Rabobank established process KPIs to measure the impact of Camunda on time-to-market and overall efficiency, expecting in excess of a 30% improvement in their development cycles.
“Our time-to-market was too long. With Camunda 8, we expect to reduce this by at least 30%. That means going from a year to around 6-8 months, and when each sprint currently costs around €50,000, it soon adds up if you’re fast.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank
As the journey progresses, Rabobank continues to refine its processes, aiming for a library of reusable components, leveraging AI-enable process orchestration in the future, and optimizing their orchestration for even greater customer satisfaction.
Rabobank’s presentation and journey with Camunda are a testimony of the power of embracing digital transformation in the banking sector through leveraging process orchestration and automation—leading to a competitive advantage and critical necessity that users expect.
Rabobank is a cooperative bank with a mission, having been dedicated to creating a future-proof society and tackling major societal challenges for 125 years. A critical part of this is trust and the customer experience. By thoughtfully integrating a new process orchestration platform, the bank has positioned itself for heightened agility, successfully circumnavigated negative regulatory scrutiny, improved customer service, and served its customers in the way they expect services to be delivered, and sustained growth.
After their presentation, Louwris and Pascal joined us for an informal chat as a part of our ongoing Conversations with Friends and Customers series for 2024/25. In their behind-the-scenes interview, they spoke further about their Camunda 8 journey, their plans for the future with AI integration, why SaaS was the right choice for them, and how Rabobank’s IT department can now run €5.4 million worth of sales processes and support six million customers per year with Camunda.
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