Streamline your sales process with sales lifecycle management for Financial Services

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- Welcome all to this financial services breakout session on customer lifecycle management. My name is Jeroen Davids. I'm an account executive for FS for the Benelux region, and I'm based out of the Netherlands, and I'm at Appian since 2018. So it's a pleasure for me to introduce our speakers for this financial services session. It's Arne Snauwaert from Mollie. That's a leading FinTech payment service provider based out of the Netherlands. And we have Claus Mitterlehner from Raiffeisen Bank International, leading incumbent bank from based out of Austria and active in Central and eastern Europe. They will share their journey with Appian and show how they leverage the power and the flexibility, both of Appian, and yeah. And for Mollie as a FinTech provider, but also for an incumbent bank like Raiffeisen Bank. So I'm very happy to welcome Arne on the stage for his story. Thank you. (applause) - Good morning, everybody. I have a clicker, yeah? Here's a pointer. So, first speaker is me. I'm Arne. I work as a product manager at Mollie. More specifically in the team responsible for making operations more efficient. Why should we make operations more efficient? Let me first introduce you to this story and then tell you about the journey we have with Appian. Mollie is a payments provider. We do online payments. We try to move money from your wallets to the person you're buying something from. To the merchant, as we call them. We process payments, credit cards, ideal bank contact in various regions. We started in the Netherlands, we're now expanding across Europe. And something happened with us in the last five years, especially in the last two years. Something we didn't expect to happen, it's called a pandemic. We all faced this and it all also happened for us. It happened in a very positive way because the normal brick stores, the normal brick and mortar stores closed because of the pandemic. And now all of a sudden, everybody was required to go online. Everybody was required to have a web shop because that was the only channel for selling goods or delivering products and services. And this really made some cracks in the foundation of our company. We didn't expect this to happen. We were having a growth rate of around 70, 80% a year, and all of a sudden, year after year, a growth rate of 200% happened. Something in volume, something we never happened. In 2020, we were with a hundred people. A hundred people running a normal growing startup business. We were fine, our processes were set, and then Covid happened, and we threw people at the problem. We hired massively, 600 people hired in two years. There were months where a hundred person starting. I just got new colleagues, a hundred new colleagues I didn't know because we had a lot of things to solve, a lot of problems to solve because of the pandemic. Since we tend to say we're a FinTech, we're a financial technical company, but when it all comes down, for the ECB, we're just a regular bank. We work under the same licenses as bank do. We need to comply with the same rules. We need to check the same data points on merchants or on customers. We need to adhere to these regulations. We need to do a proper compliance and due diligence process. And these processes back in the days in 2020 were working really good for an intake of 500 customers a month. But that when corona happened, we weren't equipped, we weren't set up for these kind of process, for these kind of volumes for these customers. We had more than 50 processes to manage the life cycle of our customers. For some in the industry, for people in the industry, some of you will know these names. Event driven review, I know the ECB loves this. These kind of processes were really badly tracked, were really badly set up. Just people were doing these kind of processes in the following tools. Slack, Google Sheets. Google Sheet was running our company. That was really bad situation because that is not scalable, that is not traceable, that is not auditable. You can't build a company on Google Sheet, but it was the thing they had. It was the tool they had available in 2021 when we had a sudden spike in customers. We needed to do something. It was doing this or it was sinking. It was stopping to take customers on. And that's how we run our company in the last three years, Google Sheets. I've told you some of the problems. CSAT, of course. Customers were really complaining. Why I am I not receiving an answer of you yet? Because you're stuck in row 88 on a Google sheet that is only reviewed once a week. Sorry, dear customer. That's not an answer you can give them. That's not the kind of service we want to provide them. That's not the kind of service we provided them before the pandemic happened. Also ESAT. If you're working day to day in Google Sheet, that is more than 10,000 rows that's crashing because the the browser memory is not capable from running the sheet. Yeah. You will get bored of your job. You will get frustrated in your job. So that's why some smart minds at Mollie went into a room late last year, at the end of last year, and thought of a solution. And out the book of solutions called a case management system. Yeah, a case management system. That is how companies tend to solve these things. It is a tool that allows you to build processes, workflows to run your company from start to end, from trigger to goal, as we call it internally. We set some principles on paper. It presents information in managed workflows (indistinct). It makes sure that we can manage our company in a more structured way than doing something in Google Sheet and escalating via Slack. We put some objectives on a paper, and then we said like actually, okay, case management. What is a case to Mollie? How, what's the case? How, okay. So we started defining with some business architects, which one of them, Peter is in the room. We define what is the case. This is an internal slide. Okay, this is totally new and as always at Mollie, we try to make something that works for everybody and give it, we try to take something that works for everybody and give it their own interpretation. Like, what is this for Mollie a case? An internal slide. Okay, a case is a set of tasks. It's a trigger, it has a goal, and so on and so on. And this is what the foundation. This is how we approach stakeholders. Like we believe we can make operations more efficient by implementing a case management system and actually a framework. We defined how a case should be, and we believe by doing this, we can go to seven processes from more than 15 to a set of seven. These seven are in the current scope of the team, and these seven are the things we'd like to touch. What we are actually doing is we're consolidating processes because these processes were actually not processes, but just the name of a Google Sheet. A negative balance was a Google Sheet that was reviewed every week, and that is what they call the process. But that was no process. That was just a way of doing things because they made no sense. We went on the market with this idea of having a case management solution before we thought of making this ourselves, but we're a payment service provider. We're not a case management service provider. So we'd like to always say, spend your engineering capacity, spend your pressure PHP engineering capacity, the core of your product, which is not cases. So we went on the market, and we drafted an RFP, CMS requirements list. It was a really long list. It we sent it to multiple tools in the market. Tools we thought of that could do this because if you Google case management, there's actually no fair provider that's saying, I do case management. There are many tools. All do some kind of this, all have some kind of flavors. In the beginning, we didn't expect it. It was a hard battle to convince management of this because it was really intangible. But this was an engineering driven decision at Mollie, it was also something really supported by engineering. So the PHP engineers themselves looked at it, and in the end, we made a decision to go for Appian. That's how we landed with Appian in March this year. Only March this year, we signed a contract with Appian. We said let's pick Appian because the tool is flexible because we can build a solution how we want it because they have industry expertise and because they know how case management should be done, but they're not defining how we should do case management. We can build it how we want it to be and still tap into a really big pool of knowledge. We went with Appian guarantee in March. We started it in April, and we landed with the first MVP only, well, already in June. End of June released the first MVP. We released the first case in Appian. This is how this tool looks today. So it has everything required it to be. This was built by guarantee in six weeks. We really blew management away by this. It has the concept of a case. If you click open a case, you see the tasks in a case, we see who should do it, you see some information on the organization. You can see communication, auditing, documents, it's all there. It's all that Google Sheet didn't have, it's all here. You can change ownership. This is how we started the journey. This is the beginning. We build a foundation at Mollie. We said, okay, we need to do case management, but we also need to do proper case management. We need to implement something that will last for many years. So this is one case, it's called credit trust preview. It's where we review the financial position of customers processing transactions with Mollie. But this screen can also work for a boarding case or for an event driven review or for any other case because we try to make something that's looks similar for every different case. We don't try to build 10 different systems applications for the cases. They should all work here. While the process is different, everybody that is used to work in this tool should be able to work in every case. The task should be contextual, and we should not be needing to train like months and months people new started at Mollie to understand how this works. Six months after starting with Appian, credit risk review, 226 cases handled and counting. This slide is two weeks out. I can't pull in a new number. Merchant risk review is a case and active development together with a consultant we're now using. Next Wave, also in the room. Integrity risk onboarding. That's the mother of all cases. That's the biggest case we do because integrity risk onboarding is where we validate CDD policy of the customer. We need to check all the compliance rules of DCP, terrorism financing, fraud financing and so on. It's a prototype, and that's one of the key things I like about Appian is you're really able to deliver prototypes fast. You're really able to deliver an interface really fast to stakeholders. I lived in a PHP world where I need to give my engineers a task to build a screen and it took weeks. It took weeks because, in PHP and in CSS and HTML, it's not that easy as an Appian, drag some boxes on a screen and you have a visual interface. So we decided to build a prototype so I can go to stakeholders and see like, look, the most complex case in this company, this is how it will look like. And that's how we bought them in. That's how we got sponsorship from them. The end goal is to have all of these go from 50 to six by end of the year next year, 2023 in Appian. I want to have everybody in operations department handling their cases here so that we have full visibility, traceability, flexibility in how we first develop. And this is only the start because we started with Appian in operations. We chose Appian because of problems in operations, but we already see that other departments at Mollie, commerce, for example, are looking at Appian and what they can do with the tool. It's so flexible, it's so customizable. So we started with with operations, and I don't know where it's gonna end. And with that, so I've told you now the story of Mollie and why we chose Appian. I can announce Clause. From a total different angle, but also a really interesting story. Claus, I'd like to welcome you on the stage. (applause) Thank you. Good luck. - Thank you, Arne. From the FinTech to the incumbent now. Yeah, as you announced that we are an incumbent here in the financial service industry. Let me shortly introduce myself as well. Claus Mitterlehner. I'm heading here the smart automation team here at Raiffeisen Bank International. So, smart automation. We enable our businesses here with what we call smart automation capabilities. So talking here about robotic process automation, attended, unattended automation, process mining, document processing, data extraction, but also here, workflow, workflow support, process support. We have built up here, sorry. We have built up here a nice, maybe you have to switch off your mic, Arne. We also built here up a nice portfolio, and we introduced here also last year. And so we also got new customer here at Appian. The the Appian platform. So we introduced that last year in summer. So we now have an experience, which I would like to share with you, a little bit more than a year. But before, I think the minority here probably has an idea who we are. So Raiffeisen Bank International, so let me also share some facts and figures about RBI. So Raiffeisen Bank International is a midsize bank. We are operating here out of Vienna, out of Austria. The headquarter is in Vienna, but we operating in 12 different countries here in central and eastern Europe. So really from north going down to south from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, going down here to the cost of Albania. So you see that this is quite a complex geographical footprint as some countries are part of the European Union, others are not. So we have different jurisdictions, legislations. We have about 10 additional presences really across the world. So we have some rep offices in other countries as well. But our core geography is really central and eastern Europe. We have about 17 million customers. We have about 44,000 employees. We have about 1,700 outlets, branches in this geographies. Total asset is above 200 billion at the moment. And we are stock listed company. We are stock listed here. So 40% is free float on the stock exchange and 60% is still owned by local Austrian banks. So that's the short facts and figure slide about Raiffeisen Bank International. I also want to share here, because automation for us is key. That's clear, so this is not a surprise for all of you. But we have to somehow follow the gravity, and I'm an operations guy, as the team as well. And I would like to show you how we would like to contribute to this overall transformation within Raiffeisen Bank International. We defined our strategy in 2020, 2021. Breaking it down, strategic roadmap for the next five years. And here, we see here, okay, there's something missing. Okay, so that's, I think I will show. So the first bullet point here is we do an HL transformation here for couple of years already. And we defined here vision statement for 2025 to become here the most recommended financial service provider in our region. We see here IT and operations as major contributors, co-leading here, all this technology transformation here together with the business. We define long term inhibitions. We defined KPIs, targets, end to end automation, adaptive setups. Working in a fully agile mode using latest technologies. We have a clear cloud strategy, having 80% of our applications in the cloud by end of 2025, and so on and so forth, yeah. I don't want to bore you too much. From an operations perspective and here now, how we think we will contribute here is, on the one side, we have defined this smart automation portfolio so that we have these capabilities and we put here also the Appian platform really in the center to have the support for what we call digital process automation. There's another concept which we call operation goals adaptive. So this is now a new concept bringing together business and IT plus the operation guys. They have the same targets. They make the joint decisions. And the idea is here to become even faster here with such an approach. When we started here last year, or we started a little before already, we said we wanna do it differently. So we do not want to add here the the Appian platform as an additional IT system to the IT landscape. We said we will do it differently. And how we did it, we'll show you. We set together here with the enterprise guys, enterprise architecture guys, and we tried to position the platform from an, I would say from a process perspective. We said, and it's going here from left to right, getting more and more complex. We said, okay, we wanna support here simple task management. So these are the typical use cases within the bank where business needs support. So there's simple task management where you have to organize some tasks. So you can do this with different solutions. Here, there are classic ticketing systems. There is the kind, maybe you're using compound boards, whatever. Then the business needs support here for workflows. Yeah, for workflows. So you have kind of, you have a sequence of activities which have to be somehow put in a flow. Could be that you have to do some approvals. Could be that you have already some embedded workflows in packaged systems, like if you have a document management system. And normally, the flow is around to the document. So here, this we didn't see as the typical playground for Appian We said there are other solutions in place. You can do that also with Appian. Yeah, that's clear. But there are other means how you can do that. And now moving here to the right it gets, as I mentioned, more complex. And here, we are coming here into the playground of Appian. Typical, we see here the need to support case management on the business side. So couple of people working together on a case going back and forth, they have to make decisions. And so they also have some ad hoc activities to add, some ad hoc requests. This is a typical playground here for Appian. And the most complex one, we said this is the end to end orchestration. This is really where we wanna orchestrate along a value chain end to end, bringing together different departments across board areas. Having different systems along the value chain in this end to end process. And we want to orchestrate them to create kind of transparency. So the right two pillars we see here is the typical playground. There's a clear recommendation here to go here with Appian, with the Appian platform. For the other ones, we leave it up to the business owners. The journey so far, wanted to share with you as well. So as I mentioned, we started somehow end of 2020. We had first contact here with a financial services team here from Appian and had some exchange, some discussions. Then we started here into some POCs also with other vendors. And finally then, had some contact negotiations and decided to go here with Appian. And we trained here then, the staff, and then moved on here and set up here the in-house platform management. We decided to go here with Appian architect services, and then kicked off here the first initiatives. As you will see here, we had a couple of applications now implemented on the platform, and it's mainly here. We started here in this area of workflow in case management. In the meantime, we also started here and have implemented solutions here for this end to end orchestration here. So talking about corporate lending, talking about client lifecycle management. Also the title of the session is having a digital first approach to client lifecycle management. And I will shou you the two the two business cases. This is also here how we try to convince the stakehold members and the board members. We told them we have a quite fragmented process, and we are lacking here the transparency. And the midterm vision here is that we have a streamlined process in place. So we have here this high level process. Customer shows up, is asking here. Has a request for corporate loan, has to undergo through all these different steps here, credit analysis and so on and so forth. At the end, then it gets dispersed, and then the corporate loan gets in a kind of maintenance monitoring phase. We have different people here, client relationship managers, risk guys, credit office, credit operations. We have here so called touch points as we wanna measure. Then at the end, we wanna measure also the process. We wanna calculate some KPIs. We wanna get this transparency. We wanna inform our clients, our customers about the status within the process. We have here then kind of automation support, which is already available, we are adding. And we have here these different systems really from front ends to documents management systems, core banking system, contract management systems. And we now explain them. In order to organize that all, we need a kind of orchestration layer. Yeah, and here the orchestration layer, this is really, this is the glue. That's the glue really connecting the dots, bring together all the different systems, the people, the data from the external systems of applications. And with this orchestration, we are able to provide this full transparency. So that was the vision. In the meantime, this is life. It's still ongoing. Couple of releases are done, and we also visualized that for the board members so that they get an understanding how the flow goes. Yeah? And finally, we convinced them we were successful, and this is an ongoing story now. The second example I have here is the client life cycle management. Here, we started a little bit later. So this is about client onboarding, client offboarding, KYC topic. Similar approach for granted process. Here, we wanna make this digital first approach. Here, we have also have here this high level process, onboarding, maintenance, offboarding of clients. There's also a component here for the group, group KYC as clients are in different geographies, and we wanna give them also here a nice experience when onboarding in the different countries. Same story, people, automation support, integration with systems. Again, same story, orchestration layout. This time, it's the orchestration by the process engine. But in addition, we also are using here rules. Rules engine is, as we define, all the rules based on the customer, you know, the customer structure, who are the owners, who is the beneficiary of the customer, what is the underlying legislation jurisdiction within the countries? This is then put into a rule structure. And based on this rule structure, then we identify the documents which are needed, which are requested from the client. Here we also use here parts of an accelerator. We are using here case management accelerator, which even speeds up the whole process. So these are two high level examples. For the sake of time, I will move on. So finding so far from our journey is, Appian, and we see it really as a one stop shop. So we have everything on one platform now. You design, you develop, you test, you deploy, you monitor it. It's there. And as I heard yesterday, if you miss a feature, just wait for the next release. I think that was the message from one of the guys yesterday from, I don't know, (indistinct). It's about speed to value. So this is, anyhow, this is the promise from the Appian guys. But we also saw that we can do topics quite fast. We can really speed up here in the development. We can do it even faster as the IT colleagues. So we also do here MVPs within five sprints. So it means each sprint, two weeks. So talking about 10 weeks, we have an MVP in place, roll it out. Then software as a service, we decide to go here for Appian in the cloud. Use software as a service. This also helps a lot, as we do not have here really to sort out all these issues with infrastructure and if you have this fully cloud- based approach, when you have high availability, high security, this helps a lot. For sure, there are also some challenges in the beginning really to embedded here in the overall setting of RBI. Integration connectivity meant this is building functionality of Appian anyhow, but it's also easy to integrate via web APIs, APIs with third parties, and systems and applications. And if you have this integration in place, then it also, over time, you have these objects which are reusable and you build up here library of such reusable components. And finally, and then here I will stop with my presentation, it's about the client and employee satisfaction. So using the platform and having this end to end view, really we have this end to end transparency, and this really provides this total experience, not only to our customers, but also to our internal employees. Thanks.