Process Mining as a strategic capability for improving the risk and operational framework at ABN AMRO

Reference Case

Client profile

Client: ABN AMRO
Industry: Financial Services, Banking
Process: Operations Detecting Financial Crime

The Process Mining investment provides a return along three axes: strengthening the risk control framework, drive operational excellence and improve the customer experience. All using the same data and one tooling.”

Peter Leijten

Program Manager Control Automation of ABN AMRO

Story

Improving Risk & Control Processes

ABN AMRO was fined 480 million for lacking Anti-Money Laundering adherence in 2021. The bank seeks to improve the risk control processes, replacing the current manual way of working and getting in control. It needs a robust way of evidencing compliance with legislation to the authorities.

Process mining is used to improve the risk framework and evidences the compliance with regulations to the authorities. The bank is ready to replace the manual sample-based assessments by implementing 100% end-to-end automated process monitoring of business-critical processes. Strengthening the risk & control framework helps the bank mitigate the risk of reputation damage and fines.

Results 6 +

Business critical E2E processes mined

Proven Value of Process Mining

The operations department Customer Care served as an initial use case where process mining was leveraged to guide the transition to a new workflow management system. This initial use case proved the value of process mining for the bank and helped initiate ideas about the implementation possibilities of the technique.

The main challenge of the department was analyzing the mid- and back-office processes manually resulting in a large amount of manual work and human error. Process mining was leveraged to guide the transition to a new workflow management system.

Results 2 weeks

For first insights by process X-ray

Towards Operational Excellence

Before the implementation of process mining, there was no single source of truth at the KYC Operations department. Due to siloed reporting, reporting gaps and reports based on Excel or manually created data with questionable correctness. This led to steering based on gut feeling and subjective information.

Process mining is used to drive operational excellence. The end-to-end, cross-departmental process monitoring is used to gain data-driven and real-time process insights. This is a new way to break with silos, pinpoint bottlenecks and steer the day-to-day performance. Improving the operational framework brings value across many KPIs as it results in cost reduction for the bank and improved experience for the client.

Results 10 mln

Identified value

Center of Excellence

After the acquisition of a license for the Execution Management System (EMS), a Celonis Cloud service, the bank-wide usage of Celonis was not guaranteed. It was hard to find business commitment from new Business Units (BU) needed for scaling Process Mining, because of limited clear value upfront. This resulted in a relatively limited number of active users and a low level of enterprise-wide adoption.

In order to make more impact and embed the process mining capability further within the bank, a centralized Center of Excellence (CoE) was established to support any new business unit in starting its own process mining journey. The CoE operates together with a task force that is dispatched dedicated to a new process to kick-start the analysis and guide the new department in its usage of process analytics. This makes for shorter onboarding and faster time to value.

Results 7 +

Collaborating departments

Train New Business Users

Finally, the process mining adoption is only successful when the business as usual is properly enabled and trained. Without user enablement and adoption of the process mining capability, an organization can not realize its full potential.

For this, we have developed a training curriculum supplementing the Celonis online courses with which we educate users from all ranks of the organization. Three federated teams of analysts and many business users have been trained. The federated CoEs and teams are enabled to maintain and develop further the process mining environment and train new business users. Role definition and responsibilities, and more importantly, user enablement ensure sustainable growth of data-driven improvements through process mining and acceleration of value realization.

Results 100 %

User adoption

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