Sparebanken Vest raises business process autonomy, increases business visibility, and improves scalability and efficiency with Camunda

Sparebanken Vest (SPV) is Norway’s second-oldest savings bank and the third-largest in the country. Known for its local customer focus, it is on a path of expansion. While merging with a similar institution and with growth ambitions for the future, SPV faced challenges with its existing workflow systems, which relied heavily on manual processes and were rapidly becoming outdated. SPV also wanted to streamline and optimize its automated enrolment processes to offer customers the best experience possible.

The challenge

SPV’s existing process automation systems were inflexible, relied on niche and redundant technology, and still required manual intervention for much of their execution.

New DevOps teams couldn’t easily adopt the system’s legacy technology, leading to a bottleneck within the specialist team that could develop custom automation code. This lack of broader autonomy meant that other teams, when implementing more automated workflows, had to depend on the specialized team, which was already backlogged with priorities. The bank required a modern solution that was developer-centric and could alleviate the bottleneck, reduce technical errors, provide a smoother and more automated process for onboarding customers, and orchestrate back-end services.

The solution

The bank’s leadership resolved to pilot a modern workflow system with Camunda. They focused initially on private customer onboarding, a process involving multiple automated steps. Before Camunda, this process was tackled with a synchronous API approach that often resulted in lost data and a lack of clarity on where the process had failed.

“With Camunda, we significantly decreased technical errors, rapidly going from a 5% error rate to “0.something.”
– Markus Nordstrønen, CTO, Bulder Bank (SPV subsidiary)

Camunda process orchestration has been adopted for better visibility, where incidents can be quickly identified and resolved. Additionally, developers can handle technical issues more effectively with fewer interruptions and delays due to a more efficient workflow system. As a result, SPV has a more customer-friendly onboarding interface and smoother client experience.

The results

“The across-the-board visibility Camunda provides into each customer’s onboarding has renovated how we identify and resolve issues, now more swiftly and effectively. It’s bridged the gap between business and IT, allowing us to gain insights into every facet of process orchestration and enhance the customer journey in real-time.”
– Rudolf Brunner, System Engineer, Sparebanken Vest

The bank noticed immediate improvements in its processes:

• Increased visibility: Full insight into where each customer is in the onboarding process has enabled quick identification and resolution of any issues. This has improved alignment between business and IT, affording insights into every area of orchestrated processes and the customer journey.
• Autonomy: Teams can now approach problems and implement workflows without reliance on the specialized development team.
• Efficiency: With Camunda, technical issues dropped significantly, and manual workflows were replaced with automated processes, accommodating the increased volume of corporate customers.
• Scalability: The system’s ability to handle a growing customer base was proven by the bank’s mobile-only counterpart, which experienced a significant increase in corporate customers.
• Customer experience: Through greatly reduced technical issues and a smoother onboarding process, customers now benefit from a more reliable and seamless transition to the bank’s services.

“Process orchestration has drastically cut down on technical glitches, which means a smoother onboarding flow. Our customers are now experiencing a more dependable and uninterrupted transition to our banking services, and when it comes down to it, that’s what we’re here for…”
– Rudolf Brunner, System Engineer, Sparebanken Vest

Further adoption

The organization is currently using Camunda to orchestrate and optimize various processes:

• Corporate customer onboarding: Automating more basic tasks like retrieving public registry information, scoring models for risk assessment, and integrating with the older workflow system for manual tasks.
• Data synchronization: Implementing an automated sync of corporate customer data with public registries, moving from a monthly to a daily process, targeting only changed records.
• Cardholder enrolment: Automating the process for enrolling employees of companies as cardholders for business expenses.

Technical highlights

When speaking to the IT team at SPV, they specifically highlighted the following additional advantages of Camunda adoption:

• Local testing: Developers could run the complete system locally, enabling comprehensive automated testing of the entire workflow and individual components.
• Source-available advantage: The ability to inspect the source code of Camunda components helped the bank’s platform team understand the system’s inner workings and troubleshoot issues effectively.
• The cloud advantage: Powered by Zeebe, Camunda 8’s cloud-native workflow engine provides SPV with scale, speed, and security by integrating seamlessly into their pre-existing Cloud infrastructure.

“As a developer, running Camunda locally has been a game-changer. It lets us run automated tests on every part of our workflow, and being open-source has given our platform team incredible insight into the system’s architecture, smoothing our troubleshooting processes and really raising our overall efficiency.”
– Rudolf Brunner, System Engineer, Sparebanken Vest

SPV’s decision to adopt Camunda 8 has resulted in a more efficient, transparent, and scalable process orchestration system. The improvements in technical error rates, the ability to autonomously develop workflows, and the greater integration of automated processes have positioned the bank to serve its growing customer base better and continue its expansion efforts.