Business Process Transformation in Commercial Lending
Fulton Financial Corporation, a financial services company headquartered in Lancaster, PA, decided to invest in their commercial lending line of business and eliminate manual processes, streamline interdepartmental communication, and give lenders more time to do what they do best — engage with prospects and customers and solve business issues. The entire commercial loan origination process, a source of frustration for Fulton’s lenders, was to be transformed into an end-to-end enterprise solution with goals to
- Improve customer experience
- Improve employee experience
- Reinforce effective risk and controls
- Increase operating efficiency
The challenge? Getting a diverse group of stakeholders, with their own priorities and pain points, to agree and compromise on an enterprise solution that would adhere to a realistic scope and timeline. Systems Flow stepped in with an answer.
Scope Definition and Project Planning
Our first step was to support Fulton executive leadership in initial scoping and project definition efforts. Diligent on-site discussions resulted in an approach that would maintain sufficient rigor and also work within time constraints mandated by the bank’s board of directors. The accelerated schedule needed to accomplish
- facilitation of large stakeholder workshops to inform current and future-state processes and architecture
- follow-on workshops to capture and refine business requirements
- strong IT engagement in creation of detailed solution architecture and interface control documentation
The end goal was to give business users a voice in a technical solution that included a commercial off-the-shelf solution (COTS) and potential custom solutions to supplement out-of-the-box functionality.
With mutual agreement on an approved project approach, we began planning the stakeholder workshops.
Capturing the Current State
All-day, multi-week workshops provided numerous opportunities to walk through the current commercial loan origination process, learn about pain points, and build a mindset of cross-departmental cooperation – a crucial factor in the success of this enterprise solution. Systems Flow ensured the workshops ran smoothly day after day, from room setup and breakdown to effective conversation, time management, and decision-making. Participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive – energizing the team to move on to future-state definition.
Envisioning a Future State
With the current-state process sufficiently documented with system context diagrams and activity diagrams, the team turned to designing the ideal future-state process. To understand the various desires and improvement needs, listening sessions were arranged with dozens of stakeholders spread across the commercial lending line of business.
Systems Flow was an integral partner in planning and scheduling, working closely with project leadership to tailor session cadence to expectations and obtain maximum project benefit. Whether a large on-site discussion or a small web-based teleconference, we ensured efficient use of everyone’s time and provided management with visibility into team resource capacity.
Weeks were spent documenting desired business process improvements, resulting in a comprehensive Future-State End-to-End Process, that included future-state system context diagrams, activity diagrams, and process narratives. The resulting process document contained the overarching vision for the project’s end-state and informed the business requirements gathering process.
Defining Business Requirements
Thanks to current- and future-state process definition efforts, we began the crucial business requirements phase with a clear understanding of the current process and its improvement goals. Over several months of on-site, day-long workshops, we crafted use cases and gathered business requirements from stakeholders of all major functional areas of the commercial loan origination process. Requirements were drafted and refined through several working sessions until five comprehensive Business Requirements Documents (BRDs) were ready for final review and approval. These BRDs included
- Master BRD for overarching, cross-process requirements
- Lending Processes BRD for commercial loan origination, modification, and renewal requirements
- Portfolio Management BRD for requirements related to ongoing loan account monitoring
- Generate Documents BRD to cover standard loan document, letter, and form generation requirements
- Reporting and Data Analysis BRD to cover requirements related to transactional reporting and data analysis
Supplementary artifacts to the BRDs included
- Data Matrix of data elements as identified by business users throughout the requirements gathering process; these data elements were intended to serve as data requirements for the chosen solution
- Task Matrix of various auto-generated task reminders required by business users to complete necessary activities and satisfy compliance and policy mandates
- Notification Matrix of auto-generated alerts needed by business users for task and loan origination lifecycle monitoring
- Document Mapping templates for standard loan documents generated by the solution based on data elements within the solution
With this comprehensive set of documents, business leaders confidently moved into the vendor selection phase able to determine if a commercial offering aligned with their 1800+ business requirements. In addition, business and technical leads had a better understanding of the technology market’s “out-of-the-box” functionality and where customization or alternative processes might be needed to meet their business requirements. With this crucial understanding of business need, project management chose a commercial lending solution and proceeded to the next phase of the project: Design and Implementation.
Designing a Technical Solution
Having been involved in this commercial loan origination project since its earliest stage, Systems Flow was well-positioned to bridge the gap between the business and its implementation partner, ensuring technical reality aligned with business need. This technology-business alignment included integration specifications for 13 business systems that had to work with the commercial lending solution. These systems ranged from externally-hosted industry-standard services to locally-hosted enterprise software solutions. To identify all integration points and processes, we researched APIs and coordinated with system administrators, contract owners, external software vendors, and technical personnel. The resulting interface control documents included
- detailed technical requirements
- logical diagrams and physical diagrams of technology components and communication methods in the interfaces
- data context diagrams and data models to illustrate data structures and data flows
- activity diagrams to describe technical processing steps initiated by interface operations
- notional data mapping based on business-identified data elements and data elements exposed by interfacing system APIs
To further assist in the integration analysis, we provided options analyses to business and technical stakeholders, to inform their decisions on final system integrations. For example,
- Engage a development partner to create a custom interface with an existing legacy system? Or utilize the new commercial platform’s integration with a different third party application?
- Pass system communication through a single enterprise service bus or integration platform as a service (iPaas)? Or develop point-to-point integrations?
Analysis of each alternative was based on the solid technical expertise of our solution architects coupled with a deep understanding of the business requirements. With our facilitation of options analysis discussions, the Fulton team quickly came to consensus and allocated resources accordingly.
In parallel with the integration design, we partnered with Fulton’s IT stakeholders in development of a solution design. Using solution architecture best practices and multiple facets of Fulton’s IT governance guidelines, a technical design was created using system context, logical, physical, and data context diagrams. In addition, our design
- identified technical and procedural risks to the solution, based on design decisions
- quantified expected user and data volumes
- described high-level disaster recovery requirements (Recovery Time Objective/Recovery Point Objective)
- documented IT stakeholder support responsibilities
- provided an overview of the solution’s scalability options
- documented open issues and design decisions
The solution design was a critical deliverable meant to not only memorialize the design decisions for audit purposes, but also empower the Fulton team in their solution implementation.
Ensuring Successful Transformation
Our on-time delivery of high-quality artifacts, planning, and facilitation was crucial to presenting a clear understanding of Fulton’s business need and keeping the enterprise project on track, especially with its highly visible schedule constraints. Our approach to business analysis and solution architecture along with experienced workshop facilitation brought everyone together effectively and efficiently, resulting in mutual recognition, decision-making, and a clear path to implementing a successful enterprise loan processing solution.
You, too, can achieve visible value and sustainable results.
Systems Flow can help.
Strategic thinking. Put into action.
Informing Investment Decisions with Sound Assessment Data
To effectively manage investments in an organization’s technology stack, decision makers need a clear understanding of its software tools and technical infrastructure and how they are — and are not — meeting user expectations and needs.
Challenging questions arise when planning the approach to gathering reliable, up-to-date information on the experiences and perspectives of users of those tools:
- What information is needed to make good investment decisions? Who makes those decisions?
- How do we define “software tools”? What software do we assess?
- What assessment questions should be asked, and to what user groups?
- How can data be consistently and quickly collected and stored across enterprise functions and business lines?
- What analytics are needed to inform investment and planning decisions?
Working with the Lincoln Financial Group, we addressed these challenges and built a comprehensive enterprise application assessment solution — and jumpstarted progress towards true Application Portfolio Management.
Defining the Challenge
Lincoln Financial Group and its subsidiary companies offer insurance and investment management services to customers nationwide, with primary offerings in life insurance, annuities, retirement plan services, and employee group benefits.
To clearly inform Lincoln’s technology investment strategy, its IT team needed to know how well its application stack was supporting — and not supporting — the company’s breadth of financial services. Business and technology assessments, along with an enterprise data mart for readily accessible results, would inform that understanding.
Assessments included business user evaluation of system usability and capabilities, as well as technology stakeholder views of system components, support, and scalability. And, custom algorithms generated an overall numeric rating for each application.
But, to confidently inform technology investment planning, Lincoln determined its legacy assessment database needed an upgrade. A well-architected data mart would streamline the assessment process, accurately store and report on all evaluation responses and data algorithms, and improve user experiences with the assessment process (and, in turn, strengthen validity of responses).
Crafting a Solution through Investigative Architecture
To redesign Lincoln’s application assessment approach and tool, we established mutual agreement and definition of a minimum viable product. This entailed elicitation of well-defined requirements and implementation priorities from both business and technical stakeholders.
To inform a solution for the assessment tool and associated data mart, we produced technical diagrams that included:
- logical and physical diagrams
- conceptual diagrams
- data flows and data context diagrams
- deployment and infrastructure diagrams
These diagrams empowered the IT team to make decisions on hosting, configuration, and security of the application assessment solution in the future-state environment.
All requirements and diagrams were packaged into a comprehensive solution approach, that also included use cases, technical delivery methodology, and a delivery roadmap.
Executing the Plan
To oversee the approach and execute the plan, we managed work of Lincoln’s development and quality assurance teams, leveraging an established Agile development tool to categorize use cases, manage sprints, and assign tasks. We kept the upgrade project on-track and regularly reported status to leadership and stakeholders.
Partnering with Systems Flow, Lincoln addressed business and technology need with a feature-rich, integrated application assessment solution and a roadmap for future enhancement — all simply based on solid business requirements, a clear picture of the technology landscape, and a cohesive implementation plan.
You, too, can achieve visible value and sustainable results.
Systems Flow can help.
Strategic thinking. Put into action.
Effective Fraud Detection at Fulton Financial
All banks in the US must comply with strict regulations on monitoring of potential money-laundering activity, fraud, and accounts tied to blacklisted foreign entities. Fraud risk managers navigate these regulations and potential triggers for fraud investigation in order to protect their institution from financial and legal harm and also comply with US and international law. To ensure they succeed in this mission, an holistic view of fraud monitoring data is crucial; and a single, comprehensive fraud reporting interface can do just that.
Fulton Financial Corporation, a Lancaster, PA-based supra-regional financial services company, was equipped with a host of fraud monitoring tools and databases. However, to monitor fraud across the enterprise, those multiple disparate systems resulted in labor-intensive manual manipulation of numerous data sets in huge static spreadsheets.
Systems Flow’s expertise in optimizing business systems and processes transformed this reporting burden into a seamless, automated information management solution.
Empowering Fraud Investigators
To solve this data management and reporting issue, we worked closely with Fulton’s fraud risk management group. To assist with fraud investigations and prevent risky business transactions, this team reviewed customer data and transactional data for
- Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance
- Executing Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Account (KYC) activities
- money laundering indicators
- fraudulent or suspicious behaviors
- Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) violations
- high-risk activities based on a given customer
- Filing of Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) and Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) with investigative bodies
- filing of internal Unusual Activity Reports
Collaborating with this team, we identified gaps in current reporting capabilities as well as pain points experienced by users trying to execute critical banking compliance functions. We used this current-state analysis to design a solution that would solve this business problem.
Unlocking Business Data to Optimize Processes
Systems Flow provided technical expertise in creation of data maps to accurately consolidate shared data elements across the various databases. SQL queries were written to extract pertinent data and produce 24+ user-friendly Microsoft Excel views for end users. These queries also enabled Fulton’s corporate users to easily view, in one place, all fraud risk data across its numerous bank affiliates.
Upon removing the need to access multiple database instances for each affiliate, Fulton saw an immense decrease in consumption of all resources. As its IT team moved to consolidate affiliate bank data into a single corporate database, Systems Flow updated and tested the reports to ensure that functionality was maintained.
Adhering to best-practice development standards, these custom reports were developed iteratively and their processes well-documented to assist administrators and end users in maintenance of the underlying technical solution. We monitored performance of nightly batch processes that fed data from the multiple databases into the reporting database, and worked with the IT team to address any issues that arose.
Adding Value with Automated Solutions
To give users one, easy-to-use interface for accessing reports, we created and maintain a Microsoft SharePoint site of current and archived reports. We also built functionality that allows any bank user to submit an Unusual Activity Report (UAR), that is then automatically routed to a fraud investigator for review and action. UAR history is logged and tracked for investigators to manage its activity workflow.
This data automation delivered tangible value to Fulton by
- streamlining a manual process
- providing greater insight into potentially fraudulent activities
- increasing regulatory and reporting compliance with fraud detection
Our productive relationships with Fulton’s business and technical teams led to successful delivery of a data solution that met business needs while adhering to IT governance requirements. Our fraud risk management solutions have empowered fraud investigators to better understand, analyze, and act upon the data in their technology stack.
You, too, can achieve visible value and sustainable results.
Systems Flow can help.
Strategic thinking. Put into action.
Applying Enterprise Architecture to Business Software Development Lifecycles
Intelligent automation efforts at Lincoln Financial Group sought to establish automated processes and streamlined business functions. Our expertise in solution architecture aided in success of that effort.
This work in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) involved evaluation and ranking of 20+ projects against design criteria to determine if an involved process was a good candidate for automation. For projects that did not meet the automation criteria, detailed solution proposals provided alternative measures for improvement of those current processes.
A project example: A virtual mailroom project proposed a digitized means for handling document mailing, emailing, and faxing. Via an architectural decision document, we proposed three automation options with detailed evaluations for each option. After Lincoln’s business line selected an option, we drafted a solution design to describe that solution in detail, in accordance with stated business requirements and to provide a baseline for cost estimation. This solution design informed the development team’s technical design that detailed its technology solution. We then evaluated this technical design to ensure completeness and accuracy before development could commence.
In addition, we created reusable software patterns for developers to use in solving common problems in application design. We developed concise, consistent UML artifacts to a pattern library that supported IT projects in AWS cloud, identity management, and security. These software patterns paved the way in efforts to define reference architectures and reference implementations.
Our expertise in solution architecture and enterprise architecture was key to achievement of Lincoln’s technology objectives and leveraging of IT best practices. Working closely with all functions of an enterprise is our norm — from developers and vendors to vice presidents and senior leaders — with the goal of clear translation and strong alignment with business strategy and priorities.
You, too, can achieve visible value and sustainable results.
Systems Flow can help.
Strategic thinking. Put into action.