Needs

Exprivia for digital transformation in the banking sector

Banca Popolare di Puglia e Basilicata is a local entity that, in line with its mission, operates in close contact with the local community, supporting the economic activity of small and medium-sized enterprises and member families.

Thanks to a strong bond with people, the great ability to listen to their needs and the awareness of the changes taking place, BPPB has embarked on a phase of digital transformation of banking services since 2019, evaluating the possibility of re-engineering some activities to increase efficiency and optimize costs.

Exprivia has been able to seize this opportunity, supporting the Bank’s management in the analysis and evaluation phase of a series of automation opportunities in the Back Office, Accounting and Anti-Money Laundering offices.

Exprivia Solution

Banks’ digital transformation: how to rethink Back Office activities

Exprivia has therefore proposed a project capable of simplifying and standardizing Back Office processes, functionalizing operations thanks to Lean Organization logics and suggesting the creation of specialized work teams at a central level. By weighing up and rationalising activities, some services have been outsourced to specialised and more efficient structures.

From a documentary point of view, paperless processes have been adopted, eliminating the need to use paper. In terms of automation of high-intensity banking processes, digitization technologies have been introduced in the banking sector such as:

• Business Process Management (BPM) platforms, which allow the integration of robotic and non-robotic activities in a global automation logic;
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems, which support the traditional workforce, automating repetitive and standardized tasks;
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solutions, which increase the level of dematerialization of information, reducing the waiting time of the user in the branch, through the automation of typed inputs.

Challenges and opportunities of BPPB’s digital transformation

The digital transformation project of Banca Popolare di Puglia e Basilicata started at the beginning of 2020, with the aim of automating and improving the processes of census and change of personal data, as well as administrative and judicial foreclosure processes . Exprivia, in its dual role as consultant and system integrator, provided the licenses of the platforms and worked on the various implementations.

Among the most challenging aspects of the project was the integration of the new solution with legacy banking systems, on which the internal technical processes would still have to insist, with particular reference to the management of customer records, current accounts and assets .

In this specific case, BPPB uses Cedacri’s information systems that had to be interfaced with BPM’s new solution. Integration with these systems has been pursued with two different and complementary technological approaches: on the one hand the use of APIs (web services directly connected to BPM), on the other hand the use of RPA for all the functionalities for which APIs are not available. Within 24 months, the systems were fully operational.

Results

The digital transformation project of banks therefore aims to bring some advantages at an operational, functional and economic level. Thanks to a single application interface for process management, the operator no longer interfaces with different back-office applications, which are now mediated by BPM. The dematerialization of document processes, in addition to reducing costs, errors and waste related to paper, has optimized the incremental service: at any time, a business file can be immediately recalled and processed in all its document equipment.

In terms of centralization, another significant aspect of the redesign was the establishment of a dedicated hub for the processing of all foreclosure processes. Activities that have considerably reduced the time it takes to go through the paperwork, also making Front Office performance more efficient.