Overview
A Fortune 500 global banking platform, ranked top three in the U.S., faced a strategic inflection point. Despite commanding a market position across core banking, payments, cards, wealth management, and retirement services worldwide, the platform struggled with operational inefficiency. The client needed to maintain technology platform leadership while managing outsourced delivery that was hemorrhaging value. Legacy vendor relationships delivered minimal innovation while consuming disproportionate resources. The platform needed surgical precision, not incremental improvement.
Challenges
The US banking platform confronted multiple operational and strategic barriers that threatened competitive positioning:
- Legacy Vendor Lock-in: Existing service relationships stifled innovation while draining resources, creating operational stagnation.
- Operational Cost Spiral: High-cost delivery models with limited efficiency gain threatened margin compression across core banking services.
- Balancing Core Services and Outsourced Delivery: Managing outsourced contact center and back office delivery while trying to function as a technology platform created competing priorities and resource conflicts.
- Knowledge Dependencies: Critical operational gaps created bottlenecks that prevented scalable service delivery and consistent customer experiences.
- Innovation Deficit: Outdated service delivery approaches failed to leverage emerging technologies for productivity gains and customer experience enhancement.
- Peak Demand Scaling Challenges: Inability to scale quickly for peak demand periods without affecting service quality or operational efficiency.
- Consultative Expertise Gap: Lack of deep domain expertise and consultative approach in existing vendor relationships limited strategic value creation and outcome-driven partnerships.
How We Made It Happen
Firstsource partnered to design a multi-year, outcome-driven transformation roadmap, leveraging deep process expertise, technology, and human-centered operations through comprehensive operational audits and a consultative UnBPOTM approach. Firstsource executed a comprehensive transformation strategy through first-principles redesign and targeted technology integration:
- Onshore Efficiency Model: Deployed work-from-home operations through systematic process optimization and reduced overhead costs.
- Cross-Training Excellence: Built flexible teams across two core banking service queues, eliminating single points of failure and increasing operational agility.
- AI-Powered Productivity: Implemented Agent Assist and Speech Analytics to reduce knowledge dependencies and streamline case handling processes.
- Occupancy Optimization: Improved operational utilization through systematic process redesign and technology-enabled efficiency gains.
- Scalable Staffing Solution: Introduced gig and temporary worker models for seamless peak volume management without compromising service quality.
- Competitive Displacement: Replaced incumbent vendor through superior outcome delivery and innovation-focused approach backed by performance guarantees.
Conclusion
Firstsource transformed operational inefficiency into a competitive advantage, delivering guaranteed performance improvements and establishing a scalable foundation designed to support continued business growth while maintaining exceptional customer experience standards.