Process Modeling In Times of Great Change

These are very turbulent times in the Banking, Financial and Insurance Services sectors the world over! Many banks are being restructured, some banks are being bought by other banks. Many Insurance companies like AIG are in deep trouble and may face a lot of changes in their internal operations.

Wells Fargo is contemplating a purchase of Wachovia bank, Bank of America and J.P.Morgan Chase have bought other banks and mortgage banks on their own. Almost all of these institutions have been outsourcing/offshoring business processes for almost five plus years now. Consolidation of these companies means consolidation of already outsourced business processes.

The buying company’s approach and methodology usually survives in the combined operation and many of these efforts will go back to the drawing board to do Process Modeling of the combined processes. Their lending rules may all have been different (which is what caused a lot of the trouble in the Mortgage market in the U.S in the first place! That’s another discussion for another forum!) and so now, it involves rationalization and combining business rules and reimplementing business processes and backend IT systems to make this all work!

This is a great opportunity to think about IT upgrades with Business Rules Systems, BPM systems if they are not automated already. If not anything, it is a great opportunity to get all the processes properly documented. In many financial institutions, business processes reside in people’s heads rather than in documents anywhere!

This is also a good opportunity to rationalize and improve these business processes with upgrades of technology as well as elimination of waste in all its forms!

I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity. - John D.Rockefeller