Background
The client is one of the largest banks in the UK and provides commercial financing solutions to businesses, including factoring, invoice discounting, asset-based lending, asset financing and more. As a market leader in the commercial finance segment, the client has a 16% market share that translates to £3.7 billion.
The client’s legacy systems impacted customer experience and resulted in a high cost of service and exception management within their invoice factoring and discounting function. After evaluating several vendors, they turned to Firstsource for a solution.
Business challenge
- High cost-to-serve with an urgent need to reduce it by up to 25%
- Low productivity that required a  30-50% boost
- Process bottlenecks and sub-optimal customer journey and  customer interaction touchpoints
- Siloed operating models
- Negative customer growth (Year on year)
- Relationship-intensive processes leading to high disparity across customer experiences
- Manual, document-intensive and non-standardized processes resulted in delays and complexity
- Poor efficiency due to legacy platforms and systems
- Poor visibility into performance metrics due to lack of reporting, making  it difficult to track progress
Firstsource solution
Firstsource implemented an automation solution that is designed to help organizations integrate multiple systems, create new interfaces with automation and reduce complex processes. It leverages domain expertise, knowledge of operational excellence and robotic process automation (RPA). Some important aspects of the solution included:
-
- Identification of opportunities, dependencies and delivery of a design automation solution within four weeks
- Implementation of RPA and workflow solutions within 32 weeks, addressing all interface dependencies:
- Integration of over 4,500 invoice factoring/invoice discounting clients, leading to a unified view of information
- Rule-based workflow integration, ensuring a smooth customer/associate experience and consistency across 20+ key processes
- Seamless queue management through provision of skill-based work allocation to 100% of advisor population
- Positive impact on production volumes in the range of 32,000-35,000 transactions per day
- Successful automation of high volume processes
Business impact
The solution delivered substantial improvements across quality of service, data accuracy, customer experience and cycle time.
- Reduced cost-to-serve was achieved through cost savings of approximately $3 million
- RPA savings amounting to $3million and workflow solution savings amounting to $250k
- Nearly 30% productivity savings in a 300+ FTE (full time equivalent) environment
- RPA productivity savings of 21%
- Workflow calibration productivity savings of 9%
