Saving working time by 25%, LARION helped Customer A save cash, headcount and customer satisfaction with the SurroundCore Solution.

Executive Summary

The increasing number of tools developed over time around Customer A’s Core Banking System had created serious problems of incompatibility, lack of synchronization, and difficulties in report extraction. By integrating and optimizing all the surrounding fragmented tools into a leaner yet stronger structure, the SurroundCore Solution is able to improve internal operational processes and performance.

About Customer A

Customer A was one of the first foreign banks to be present in Vietnam since 1993. Customer A now has eight Branches and Transaction offices, one Saving Kiosk each in two major cities, Hanoi and HCMC, and two Representative Offices, servicing Retail & Wealth, Consumer Finance, Institutional and Commercial customers. Customer A has more than 750 employees, and was named the Best Retail Bank in Vietnam in The Asian Banker’s International Excellence in Retail Financial Services Awards 2013.

Challenges

As business grows, more business processes are gradually added. Along the way, more tools have been developed and added around the Core Banking system of customer A in order to enable such additional business processes. With time, customer A has more than 100 tools developed surrounding their Core Banking system. And that’s when their Multiple System Madness begins.

Staff complains about having great difficulties in following operational processes due to huge manual workload and complicated multiple-step workflows. Huge daily transaction workloads require their teams to work under great pressure to serve a vast number of customers with urgent needs, using a bulky Core Banking system. Many systems of the Bank have become old, out of date, and no longer suitable for new organizational changes. The existing systems of the Bank fail to enable managers to review the work performance and quality of their subordinates.

As per our observations, on each week day, there are on average from more than 300 to 1,000 customers coming to their head office and branches for transactions. Images of long queues of waiting customers or fully crowded rooms are very common at their offices.

The complicated internal processing often leads to errors such as data mismatch, lack of tracking and emails missing.

The bulky systems result in a burden of operational processes for staff to follow. Following such processes is a nightmare.

Even worse, more than 100 tools surrounding their Core Banking system are disjointed to each other, making it much difficult for the bank’s staff to work effectively and efficiently. As a result, productivity, customer satisfaction and management costs are all getting worse.

The Solution

In reality, most daily transactional operations have been quite manual or semi-manual since the Core Banking system does not cover them all. An automatic management information system (MIS) is needed to facilitate all such manual works, improve service quality, staff satisfaction, and make a stronger yet leaner structure for the tools surround their Core Banking System.

SurroundCore = Tools surrounding the Core Banking systems of banks

The SurroundCore is actually a consulting service package especially designed for banks to deploy suitable software solutions in order to improve professionalism and automation at banks. The SurroundCore comes into being to meet the need for improving the current status of banks’ management information system. The SurroundCore scope of service includes, but is not limited by, application enhancement, application development, and consultancy on performance improvement.

Within the framework of the SurroundCore Solution, we have been doing these jobs for Customer A to address their Multi-System Madness:

Optimizing performance

• Automation of business processes
• Optimization of databases
• Reduction of headcount
• Reduction of lead time
• Flexible reporting and exporting reports in various file formats

Optimizing performance

• Reduction of the number of tools
• Lean structure
• Communication among tools
• Addressing the synchronization issues

Code scanning for latent errors: to further strengthen the performance of the systems

Under the SurroundCore Solution, we have developed the following tools for Customer A: DPAT, SCCL, AIM, WCD, LIM, OFS, FSC, and CBO.

Results

The SurroundCore Solution brings the following main benefits for Customer A:

• Automatic processing: Under the SurroundCore Solution, there are components of computerization of business processes for automation, thus reducing manual works, paperwork, and headcount and working time.
• Flexible reporting: The SurroundCore Solution enables reporting flexibility by generation of reports in different file formats like Word, Excel, PDF, or web-based file types.
• Lean administration: Upon optimization of the system, by grouping of tools for example, the solution will help build a lean structure of tools surrounding the Core Banking System, with fewer tools and processes required, while enhancing productivity and performance.

The direct result is a smoother and more effective management system thanks to automation of business processing, easy tracking and auditing, effective data collection and review, and data accuracy ensured. More importantly, such benefits bring in significant real-life time and money saving.

Below are the benefits of a tool developed under the SurroundCore Solution:

• Prior to SurroundCore Solution deployment, it takes an average of 60 minutes to process 1 customer’s transaction, including both front-end and back-end operations. The SurroundCore Solution was able to reduce that number to 45 minutes.
• Assuming a branch of Customer A receives around 200 customers in a typical day. Therefore, the total time saved would be 50 working hours, or 6 employees. Given an average salary of VND10 million per employee, such saving equals VND720 million of cost reduction annually.
• Shorter processing time also improves both customer satisfaction , for spending less time waiting, and staff satisfaction , for spending less time doing manual works. The combined result is better service quality.

Quotes

“We are truly thrilled that LARION team can pull this off. Your solution is simply outstanding!”