Accounting for around 70% of a bank's operating costs and nearly all of its customer contact time, the front end is where a business lives or dies. UNiQUARE's Dietmar Schwarzenbacher tells Rodrigo Delgado how process-orientated software solutions can help banks to improve their customer service, reduce costs and achieve higher sales.
With globalisation and the rapid growth of technology stoking competition in the banking sector, financial institutions must look to innovate to stay ahead of the curve. The resultant products and services are raising user expectations further, creating a more customer-centric business model and forcing a bank's IT systems to adopt new processes and deliver them efficiently. New regulatory requirements necessitate standardised risk management and assessment systems, all at a time when money is in short supply.
Banks face a difficult balancing act. New systems need to be maintained, but sales teams cannot be deprived of the funds necessary to manage customer relations and pursue new business opportunities. Although far from easy, Dietmar Schwarzenbacher, founder of UNiQUARE, believes that his company's optimised software approach can go a long way to addressing these challenges.
Established in 1988, Austria-based UNiQUARE is an international software company that develops processorientated front end and customer relationship management solutions. The organisation has specialised in products for the financial services industry since its foundation, and aims to help its clients run transparent, easily controllable business processes that bring down costs and boost sales.
Its main offering is the UNiQUARE Business Management Suite, which uses standardised components that can be deployed individually or together to enable the management, implementation and continuous monitoring of the entire business process. Typically, UNiQUARE will go through a process engineering consultation with a bank to decide which functions are needed and how these should be combined. Different application models are then introduced, with the necessary information being passed along at each stage of the transformation process.
"It is technology that allows us to combine sales and marketing functions, loan origination, staff management processing and all in between," Schwarzenbacher says. "Everything is focused around optimising the contact between bank and customer."
Customer first
The Suite consists of a number of separate yet readily combined components. UNiQUARE Customer Relationship Management, for example, is an integrated solution that implements a centrally controlled, easily monitored sales strategy. As well as offering classic customer relations functionalities such as direct marketing and sales campaign planning, and task and appointment management capabilities, it facilitates the automation of repeated functions, greatly improving a bank's process efficiency.
"We calculate how long it should take to do a job," Schwarzenbacher explains. "For example, the bank's policy might be that it will reply to a customer within two days. Our software can check how many clients are in the pipeline and whether the relevant team is fast enough to get the job done. If not, our system can automatically search for free capacity or, failing that, automatically send a letter to keep the customer informed of the delay."
The UNiQUARE Customer Relationship Management solution makes important information such as customer goals and willingness to accept risk, sales objectives and target situations available across all sales channels, giving employees the knowledge they need to tailor services accordingly. In addition, the system's analytical functions can evaluate specific customer profiles and segments, identifying genuine sales opportunities and calculating the chance of a deal being closed.
"All this information is gathered and recorded in the system and available for distribution as refined, value-added data," Schwarzenbacher adds. "Because we are offering the best background information, which can be product, customer or situation-related, we can support the whole process to the maximum extent."
Loan ranger
UNiQUARE takes a similar approach towards its Loan Management solution, which is designed to execute and manage the entire loan origination process. It can support secured and unsecured loans, while its multi-language and multi-channel structure ensures the most effective use of all distribution channels. As well as creating a more optimised process, it allows for the real-time tracking of processes and corrective actions by management.
"The Loan Management solution, like all of UNiQUARE's software services, allows managers to drill down into each individual process step and organisational employee," he says. "This way, we can figure out whether a problem is related to the product itself, the design, or whether it is only experienced with certain types of customers. We can control the success of the process from an employee, product or customer angle."
This improved transparency leads to a significant reduction in administrative costs, enhanced customer service and, in turn, increased business. It also improves the reliability of the data used to make sales decisions and makes for the easy introduction of new products.
"Our interfaces to portfolio management and financial planning systems ensure that customer data is professionally analysed and evaluated," Schwarzenbacher says. "This enhances the quality of the decisions that employees make and allows for the creation of a comprehensive product catalogue."
Full circle
The last link in the process chain is UNiQUARE's Branch Innovation solution, which helps to reduce employee workload and increase their efficiency. It enables superior load-balancing and channels the specific skills of employees, automatically re-routing work so it is evenly distributed and suited to individual expertise. It is also built using state-ofthe- art modular technology, making it scalable and giving it the flexibility to produce rapid response times.
"To develop a good service-orientated application infrastructure involves a big investment, three or four times greater than is required for the Customer Relationship Management or Loan Management solutions," Schwarzenbacher explains. "A company has to design an infrastructure that can be used and reused. It needs to give you the flexibility to change basic components later on, whether they are driven by changes in law or market requirements. We often have to deal with old legacy software for which no documentation exists, but have the necessary tools to find out how these programs work."
In addition, UNiQUARE's standardised, highly automated workflows and dynamic screens ensure fast and efficient interaction. This makes for easy operation, a reduced error count and minimises the need for training, giving employees more time to dedicate towards sales activities.
"We make a point of providing strong user guidance and integrated operating instructions," Schwarzenbacher adds. "Our systems prevent redundant data entry and early consistency checking vastly reduces the error rate."
All of UNiQUARE's solutions are easily integrated into existing IT environments and back-end systems. Many banks have multiple silos, each with their own application model, whereas UNiQUARE's modular architecture allows for the optimisation of these applications into a single, flexible solution. The company's systems are based on standardised, best practice processes and the potential for customisation of individual components enables it to meet specific business needs.
"Integration is a great strength of ours," Schwarzenbacher says. "On our side we have a clear interface, but often we have to integrate multiple components from third parties. We are pretty experienced at doing this."
Looking ahead, Schwarzenbacher sees considerable potential for further optimisation based on UNiQUARE's current offering. Most banks still have plenty of scope for automation, which could result in considerable long-term savings. The next challenge, according to Schwarzenbacher, will be harnessing UNiQUARE's business intelligence capabilities to maximise the strengths of a bank's employees.
"Our focus will be to optimise the use of labour to a greater degree than we already have," he says. "At the moment our software results in efficiency improvements of 30-40% and we see no reason why this can't be improved.
Our main goals will always be reducing operational expense and multiplying sales success. This is achieved by providing the right information at the right time."
