Banking on the Cost of Complexity

Having worked a lot with banks recently, we're well aware of their huge range of product offerings. (According to Accenture, your typical bank now has about 350 products.)

What may be less apparent is the staggering cost of supporting such a variety of products. A recent Banking Strategies magazine article, Uncovering the Hidden Cost of Complexity, explains:

"In the past, financial institutions handled less variety so "assembly-line" processes evolved, processes that could handle volume well, but not variety. If you put variety through a process designed for "plain vanilla," you get increased operational and quality issues, such as workarounds, re-working, cost-overruns, increased staffing levels, etc."

The impact? Poor service levels and a confusing customer experience, which in turn lead to decreased customer satisfaction and reduced profitability.

So, what to do? The solution, appropriately enough, is to create processes which can handle variety. And that's where document assembly comes in. Advanced document assembly systems are designed specifically to handle variety (see The Sweet Spot of Document Assembly).

Automating complex documents, such as finance contracts, enables banks to handle existing product changes more efficiently, and decrease time-to-market for new products. That has certainly been the experience of our customers.