BPPB improves processes and services, from the back office to the front office

BPPB is a regional business which, in line with its mission, works in close contact with the local community, supporting the economic activity of small and medium-sized enterprises and associated families.

Thanks to a strong bond with people, a pronounced ability to listen to their needs and the awareness of the changes that are taking place, beginning in 2019 BPPB embarked on a phase of rethinking its range of services, evaluating the possibility of re-engineering some activities to increase efficiency and optimise costs.

Exprivia was able to make use of this opportunity right from the start of the process, supporting the Bank's management in the phase of analysing and evaluating of a series of opportunities for automation in operations pertaining to the Back Office, Accounting and Anti-Money Laundering offices.

Rethinking Back Office activities

Thus Exprivia proposed a project capable of simplifying and standardising processes with a series of interventions at the Back Office level, increasing operational functionality through the logic of Lean Organisation, and suggesting the central creation of specialised work teams.After weighing and streamlining activities, some services have been outsourced to specialised and more efficient structures. From the point of view of documentation, paperless processes have been adopted, eliminating the need to use paper. At the level of automating high-intensity processes, Business Process Management (BPM) platforms have been introduced which allow the integration of robotic and non-robotic activities in a logic of global automation. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems which support the traditional workforce, automating repetitive and standardised activities have also been introduced, as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solutions that increase the level of dematerialisation of information, reducing user waiting times in the branch locations through automation of typed inputs.

Challenges and opportunities

The project started at the beginning of 2020, with the aim of automating and improving the processes of gathering and making changes to personal data, as well as the processes of administrative and judicial foreclosure. Exprivia, in its dual role of consultant and system integrator, provided the platform licenses and worked on the various implementations.

Among the most challenging aspects of the project was the integration of the new solution with the legacy banking systems upon which the internal technical processes would continue to rely, with particular emphasis on the management of personal data, current accounts and customer assets. In this specific case, BPPB uses Cedacri information systems, which had to be interfaced with the new BPM solution. Integration with Cedacri systems was carried out using two different and complementary technological approaches.

On one hand, APIs (web services connected directly to the BPM) were used, and on the other, RPA was used for all the functions for which no APIs were available. The systems were fully operational within 24 months.

Benefits

The digital transformation project therefore aims to deliver several benefits at the operational, functional and economic level. Thanks to a single application interface for process management, the operator no longer interfaces with various back-office applications, which are now mediated by BPM.

The dematerialisation of document processing, in addition to reducing costs, errors and waste associated with paper, has optimised incremental service: a business file can be immediately recalled and processed with all of its associated documents at any time.

Regarding centralisation, another significant aspect of the redesign was the establishment of a dedicated Centre for the processing of all foreclosure processes. These implementations have considerably reduced the time required to complete the files, making front office performance more efficient.