Finance/Insurance Staff Tick All The Right Boxes – True Story

Staff in the banking and financial services (FS) industry are three times more likely to follow processes “rigorously” than government workers, according to new research surveying senior decision-makers by Digital Intelligence company ABBYY. In fact, almost half (46%) of banking and FS workers rigorously follow the rules, compared to just 15% in government.

However, banking and FS staff aren’t having an easy time and claim processes are too complex or there are too many to follow. Encouragingly, leaders are open to a helping hand – an enormous 98% of banking and FS bosses think process mining technologies would be helpful to their business, as did 89% in insurance.

“In a rapidly shifting industry like financial services – where legacy institutions have fallen behind new, innovative challenger brands – figuring out which processes work best and which don’t, and which are too complex or hard to understand, is a game-changer,” said Neil Murphy, Global VP at ABBYY. “Only then can the best processes be automated, freeing up staff to take on more challenging, human-centric work.”

Fortunately, FS bosses believe their staff are well-motivated to follow processes and rules. Only 12% of staff don’t have the motivation in banking and FS, and as few as 8% in insurance. Overall, a majority 9 in 10 bosses (89%) in both banking, FS and insurance said processes are “rigorously” or “mostly” followed.

Conversely, a quarter (25%) of government leaders say their employees aren’t motivated to follow the rules – and an even greater proportion (31%) think they don’t have the time. In times of crisis, processes and procedures are even more critical to getting work done. This casts a worrying light on the actions of government workers during the current pandemic.

When financial services employees do break the rules, it’s often to provide good customer service – 62% of insurance bosses have confidence that their employees do so to meet the needs of customers, and 50% of banking and FS bosses agree. This suggests financial services staff are extremely customer-driven, and willing to bend the rules when it’s better for customers.

Neil Murphy continued, “It’s vitally important for financial services firms to gain visibility into business processes as they actually behave, identify variances, and then identify how they can better meet current customer needs. This is an essential first step in achieving digital transformation. It’s especially critical for companies under unprecedented pressure, amidst a perfect storm of maintaining business continuity during a pandemic, technological disruption, and evolving customer expectations that impact call centre operations. This digital transformation can be achieved using innovative process intelligence solutions.”

Learn more on how financial services organisations can navigate their processes and content in our webinar on Digital Intelligence for Financial Services.

Methodology

The global survey was sponsored by ABBYY and executed by Opinium Research in March 2020 with 400 senior directors, MDs, owners and C-Levels with decision making capabilities within their organisation across 6 industries including banks, financial services and government.