Improving the Customer Experience through Process Automation

When Jyske Bank needed to modernize its time-consuming, tedious, but critically important Know Your Customer (KYC) process, the bank turned to process orchestration powered by Camunda. See how this transformation empowered Jyske Bank to increase customer satisfaction, decrease the manual task time for employees by 80%, all while adhering to strict international regulations.

The challenge

Jyske Bank is one of Denmark’s largest banks, expanding through mergers and organic growth to serve hundreds of thousands of customers.

Anti-money laundering regulations and fraud prevention practices have added new pressure on banking processes and the employees who work to ensure compliance with international regulations. One such banking process is commonly referred to as Know Your Customer (KYC). KYC refers to a set of guidelines that banks and other financial institutions follow to verify the identity, suitability, and risks of a current or potential customer to protect both customers and institutions from fraudulent activities such as money laundering or financial terrorism.

Jyske Bank, under regulation from the European Banking Authority and the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (Finanstilsynet), had an existing KYC process that was manually administered by Jyske Bank employees. This digital identity verification process, in order to ensure compliance with federal regulations, consisted of a set of digital identity verification activities that required employees from several different teams to complete. While this process ensured regulatory compliance, it also  created several extra steps and tasks for customers, eroding their experience while generating additional administrative work for employees. The manual nature of the existing process also meant that it was difficult to scale, so that completing the KYC process for new bank customers, or running the periodic reverification steps required by regulations, was also difficult and slow. Overall, it was a time-consuming, tedious process for both bank customers and bank employees, but one that was critically important for the bank to maintain.

The solution

Jyske Bank’s Process Improvement Department, which is responsible for identifying inefficient business processes and designing process improvements across the bank, set its sights on making the KYC process more customer-friendly, more efficient for employees and for the bank itself, and to ensure compliance with federal regulations.  

To manage the process more efficiently and minimize the impact on customers, Jyske Bank turned to process orchestration, building a process where customers could provide the bank with the necessary information through a self-service channel, combined with sufficient automated and manual control to ensure the data quality. 

“KYC was spotted as a time consuming and tedious task,” explained Gordon Gran, Senior IT Developer and head of the developer team in charge of the process improvement program. He laid out three distinct project phases the bank planned to execute in the KYC initiative:

1. Updating the customer data to ensure immediate compliance with KYC regulations
2. Building a workflow for handling new bank customers to complete the KYC procedure
3. Creating a process to review and repeat the KYC for all Jyske Bank customers on a regular process to maintain compliance with international standards.

Gran and his team quickly realized that to handle all the levels of complexity the various components of this project required, while also making the entire undertaking as pain-free for customers as possible, they would need a process orchestration engine that could handle the multiple endpoints, process steps, and necessary layers of complexity required to meet international regulations. 

Choosing Camunda

Gran and his team turned to Camunda to power these KYC processes, orchestrating all the necessary information to the customers with electronic or physical letters, as well as following up on customers who didn’t respond or didn’t wish to participate.

“We used several Camunda processes to manage long-running processes on gathering information from customers and monitor deadlines for customers and legal letters,” explained Gran.Information received from the self-service channel was then directed to the relevant employee, providing efficient handling through user tasks, alongside automatically updating relevant back-office systems.

Camunda empowered Jyske Bank to model, design and orchestrate each step of the Know Your Customer process precisely. The event-driven nature of BPMN, timers and manual tasks were all key features to keep the processes on track compliance-wise. Accounting for wait times, asynchronous responses, and the variety of states throughout, Jyske Bank refined its Know Your Customer process toward better self-service, better compliance and better customer experiences. The new process accommodated all the possible ways a customer might respond or decline, particularly in rarer cases where they weren’t customers of the bank.

Furthermore, meeting deadlines is extremely important in order to stay compliant with stringent international regulations. The process requires staff to ask for information before a compliance-set deadline is met, escalate the issue if a deadline is surpassed, and finally make reports on completed and outstanding tasks.

Implementing Camunda:

The process orchestration capabilities powered by Camunda supported all three phases of the KYC project:

1. Updating the KYC customer data: The team used several Camunda processes to manage long running processes on gathering information from customers and monitor deadlines for customers and legal letters. This includes ‘advanced customers’, or corporate entities whose company structure and business owners owners of each entity needed to be verified. In this phase, Gran’s team used a great deal of self-service components, followed by sanity checks, to ensure that the customer information was validated.

2. Handling new bank customers: Depending on the customer profile, Jyske uses its core banking system KYC feature to enlist a new customer in the KYC process, or they route the task to a special team to do the KYC task. This is managed in a Camunda process triggered every morning for new customers.
3. Review and repeat KYC for all Jyske Bank customers: To stay compliant, the bank needs to repeat the KYC process for all customers on a regular basis. This recurring review is also orchestrated in Camunda. Based on the customer profile, the team can route the KYC process to self-service and complete automatic verification.

When performing an operation of this size and importance, it is crucial for management to be kept up-to-date on progress at all times. As well as tracking progress, information from the Know Your Customer process was used to plan the resources involved in verifying the gathered data.

Jyske Bank’s Customer Service team monitored the number of open user tasks and the deadlines for compliance user tasks to be processed, in order to plan workload and work allocation. Alongside, the Know Your Customer team could monitor customer response time and success rate, and the quality of the data received, in order to optimize customer communication.

Jyske Bank first used Camunda Optimize to provide this information to management, which is interested in tracking process load and throughput, as well as measuring the degree of automation used throughout the entire KYC program. This agile tool made it fast and simple to deliver near real-time reports — making it possible to have a truly up-to-date view on the process performance, which in term supports business decisions around workload allocation and resourcing.

“Using Camunda as the orchestration layer improves insights through process transparency,” Gran confirmed.

The results:

Jyske Bank now performs the repeating-KYC process for every Jyske Bank customer, gaining full control and transparency for each response by using Camunda. The platform renders external reports, lists or spreadsheets unnecessary — everything is stored and handled within the process.

Beside the improved customer experience, the process has also become much more efficient for the employees — automating tasks that were previously manual and freeing them from keeping track of the processes. Jyske Bank estimates that employees save up to 80% of the time previously spent on these manual tasks.

For both Jyske Bank’s customers and employees, implementing a process orchestration solution has helped make a cumbersome, necessary experience better. 

“The orchestration and self-service elements have helped reduce the burden, both for the customer and the employees,” continued Gran. “For Jyske Bank, the processes have increased operational efficiency and enabled higher business agility. We are able to reuse components and subparts of the processes in new process solutions.”