Data-Driven Process Analysis for Erste Group

Payment processes were cataloged and mapped providing a graphical visualization of interconnections between processes and data across multiple business lines.

Challenge

Banks and other financial institutions work with huge amounts of data in various processes to function efficiently and effectively. However, not all processes are created equal and with international business, just like with languages, processes and terminology can be misunderstood or misaligned. With the introduction of ISO 20022, financial institutions are now being asked to standardize their data interchange on an international scale to realize end-to-end processing across domains and geographies.

Erste Group had a variety of tools that would allow them to describe their processes on one side and data on the other side. However, the connection between the processes and the data was difficult to capture and would require a lot of manual work. Erste Group found that there were inefficiencies:

Various documentation models used by different business lines
Lack of information in a consolidated view for all parties involved
Lots of time spent on manual analysis when starting new IT projects

Project in numbers

Erste Group is one of the leading banking institutions in Central and Eastern Europe spread across 12 countries. They needed to implement a solution to catalog and map their payment processes including data used by each process.

Payment related processes

10-100

Steps per process

20-30

Person days per year saved*

* Estimated saving of person days in projects per year between 20-30 days.

Objectives

Erste Group needed a solution to get a consolidated view of their processes and data in an understandable and easy-to-share visualization for all involved parties. Not only was it required to meet ISO standards, but also to increase efficiencies across multiple business lines which was previously lacking.

Solution

Erste Group implemented Accurity Glossary for a pilot project for their payment messages. The pilot’s goal was to assess the ability to meet all requirements of ISO 20022.

In the payments area, there were 89 processes which required a compounded documentation. Each of these processes involved between 10 and 100 process steps, which all needed to be described in detail. With Accurity Glossary, Erste Group was able to get a graphical representation of the interconnections between the processes and their data. However, during the pilot, they found that the existing documentation of their IT systems did not go into enough detail to be able to map all their data and processes correctly.

In addition, as Accurity Glossary was used initially on a pilot project only, Erste Group found that since they mapped only payment messages, they were lacking connections to other processes in their business, such as reconciliation, fraud, etc. and so only had a roughly 50% view of all process impacts.

Benefits

The initial trigger for this project was the introduction of ISO 20022. However, Erste Group also found benefits from a pure business perspective. By implementing Accurity Glossary, and using its process-to-data mapping, Erste Group was able to integrate with ARIS toolset through a REST API to easily import all their process descriptions including additional attributes associated with those processes.

The pilot project showed them that they could describe their processes easily and were able to get a visual representation of the interconnected data in the payments area.

Cristian Cengher, Erste Group’s Product Owner Cross Border Payments and the lead on the pilot program, is confident that if all interconnected processes in the bank are at the same level of documentation details, the Erste Group will ultimately be able to describe all processes across all business lines and easily allow all participants to use the information.

Having implemented Accurity Glossary within the pilot project, Erste Group are able to quickly assess the impact of any changes to data on captured processes. When implemented across the organization, the solution would allow all business lines in Erste Group to quickly assess project impact on all aspects of the company. Initial estimates indicate a time saving of between 20 and 30 person days in projects per year as Accurity Glossary would dramatically reduce the amount of manual analysis required in IT projects.

“

I am satisfied with Accurity Glossary. It is something new, which has a vision on how to put together all relevant information. I like working with it and would recommend it."

Cristian Cengher

Product Owner Cross Border Payments

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