Orchestrating Financial Services Processes with Business Strategy

The financial services sector faces complex challenges like regulatory changes, cost pressures, and an increasing need for improved customer experience. To stay ahead of the competition, financial services organizations need to enhance efficiency and improve their customer experiences. Automation is a clear strategic imperative that aligns to these goals.  

Camunda’s 2024 State of Process Orchestration Report underscores the importance of automation in addressing these needs: 91% of companies report increased business growth due to process automation within the last year. Additionally, 95% say automation has helped achieve operational efficiency, and 93% note automation has helped improve customer experiences. 

Process orchestration is an ideal way to get business value out of automating core business processes, transform how firms operate, and gain competitive advantage. However, many teams make the mistake of focusing on distinct projects and point solutions for automation, to the detriment of a holistic approach. For example, you may be automating simple processes (e.g. credit score checks and approvals) with a point solution but may not have full visibility into the impact this has on your end-to-end processes.  

To maximize automation’s potential, financial services organizations need a holistic, strategic approach that aligns efforts with broader business objectives. This requires a unified stakeholder vision, clear success metrics, and a culture of continuous improvement. By assessing how interconnected processes can be streamlined and integrated across departments, organizations can effectively map automation initiatives to business goals, ensuring technology investments deliver measurable outcomes. Process orchestration then drives value by enhancing the customer journey, boosting operational efficiency, and fortifying compliance and risk management. 

Unlocking Business Value from Processes 

By adopting more of a strategic approach to their processes, organizations can begin mapping process KPIs to higher-level business outcomes. Financial services institutions can unlock new value by applying process orchestration to the following areas:  

• Enhancing Customer Experience 

Due to a highly competitive market and the private, personal nature of finance, good customer experience is paramount. Through process orchestration, financial services organizations can ensure every customer touchpoint is personalized and efficient.  

Picture a customer applying for a mortgage online. With process orchestration, the journey from application to document verification, credit checks, underwriting, and loan approval is made seamless. This significantly enhances customer experience, ensuring customers have faster, smoother and more enjoyable interactions with the company. 

McKinsey estimates that in financial services, automated processes like mortgage origination can generate operational savings of over 90%, significantly reducing both time-to-market and compliance risks. This combination of speed and compliance assurance further elevates the customer experience while lowering the operational burden. 

• Compliance and Risk Management 

Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable for financial services institutions. Process orchestration aids in consistently meeting regulatory demands by automating compliance verifications, managing documents, and keeping audit records. 

For instance, it can help better orchestrate Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance checks, reducing regulatory risks and building stronger trust with regulators and customers. As well as tracking metrics such as compliance error rates and incident frequency can help institutions assess and refine their compliance efforts over time, strengthening trust with both regulators and customers. 

• Faster Time-to-Market for New Products and Services 

Staying competitive in today’s financial market requires the quick development and launch of new products and services. Process orchestration speeds up the time-to-market by simplifying the steps related to product development, pricing, and approvals.  

For example, coordinating the launch of an investment product requires synchronizing tasks across various departments, including product management, legal, marketing, and compliance. This leads to faster innovation, the capability to quickly capitalize on market opportunities, giving organizations an increased competitive differentiation. 

• Increased Scalability and Adaptability 

Financial services organizations constantly need to adjust to shifting market trends, evolving client needs, and new technologies. Process orchestration offers the flexibility to alter processes in response to surges in transaction volumes or new customer demands. As companies develop and broaden their operations, process orchestration scales smoothly, accommodating higher transaction volumes and growing service offerings. This results in quicker transaction processing times and better customer retention rates. 

 The Path Forward for Financial Services 

Having a strategic approach enables financial institutions to align automation with core business goals and gain competitive advantage. 

By systematically measuring the impact of process improvements, financial services organizations can understand the full value of automation across the business, justifying ongoing investment and optimization. By refining processes through performance data and adapting to evolving business needs, institutions can effectively scale automation efforts, maintaining long-term value.  

As market dynamics shift, institutions that master process orchestration stand to benefit from improved operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business growth.