Moving closer to a digital operating model leads to $60 million in new revenue and $9 million in savings

Our Impact 

A regional bank serving customers across the Northeast has always enjoyed a premier position in its markets—and wanted to keep it that way.  

The bank was focused on improving their customer experience, enhancing revenue and bolstering efficiency in a digital environment. Over 12 weeks, West Monroe’s team worked with the bank’s executives to analyze its current commercial lending operations and develop recommendations for optimizing processes and technology through a true digital operating model. 

The Full Story 

The Challenge 

The bank’s leaders were up against a major challenge: technology obsoletion.  

As certain core technologies approached the end of their lifecycle, competitor institutions moved quickly to make new investments and increase customer loyalty. The bank knew that any friction in their customer experience could cause clients to switch providers, so commercial lending operations needed to be designed with the customer in mind as the bank optimized for peak efficiency.  

Executives wanted an experienced and independent viewpoint to help them assess, simplify, and become a digital organization. Combining their updated operations with improved data management, the bank wanted to harness algorithmic, data-driven decision-making. That’s where we came in.   

An Undeniably Different Approach 

The bank—and every West Monroe client—has unique needs. That’s why we took a customized approach, bringing in a multidisciplinary team of banking, operations, technology, customer experience and data experts that could look at the bank’s current capabilities from multiple viewpoints.  

But to truly be digital, the driving viewpoint is the customer’s and what matters to them.  

Armed with proprietary analytical tools, our team mobilized rapidly. We developed data-driven, quantifiable insight and recommendations for optimizing both efficiency and customer experience:

• We examined commercial lending operations from end to end to identify issues and opportunities. Our analysis compared operations across products, regions, and other areas to help the bank identify and scale internal best practices.  
• We benchmarked process performance and cycle times against industry best practices and comparable lending institutions to identify opportunities for improvement.  
• We assessed current technology systems to gauge potential solutions that could enhance productivity and data capabilities and enable data-driven decision-making. 

Real Results

Our rapid but comprehensive analysis enabled us to make recommendations that reflect the bank’s unique culture and value proposition. These recommendations maximized the potential for tangible impact on the bank’s customer experience and bottom line.  

Altogether, the improvements position the bank to increase net annual commercial lending revenue by approximately 9% while reducing costs by $9 million per year.  

Outcomes include: 

• Operational design recommendations that establish clear responsibilities, standardize roles, align lower-value tasks with lower-cost resources, and reduce complexity 

• Credit sales and delivery recommendations that include segmenting activities based on risk and complexity for new money and renewals, as well as modifying policies, processes, and data usage to improve efficiencies in key areas 

• Data and system integration recommendations that will reduce manual data entry, improve data consistency, and drive automation and algorithmic decision-making. The bank can now also glean insight from data to help increase operational transparency and drive accountability across the organization