Alliance & Leicester: Image Management and Workflow Solution

With Help from Accenture, Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank Transforms Customer Service—and Achieves High Performance

Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank is a subsidiary of Alliance & Leicester plc, one of the United Kingdom's major financial institutions; it provides competitively priced banking for businesses of all sizes. It is a market leader in cash management, handling more than £1 in every £5 of High Street cash in the United Kingdom. Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank is also a specialist provider of leasing, hire purchase and other finance products to sectors such as public bodies, bus and coach operators, the haulage industry and large fleet operators. In 2006 Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank was awarded "Best Business Current Account Provider" by Business Moneyfacts for the fourth consecutive year.

Accenture was engaged by Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank in June 2004 to undertake a strategic review of the bank's operational infrastructure with the aim of significantly reducing their cost base. One of the key recommendations was to implement an image and workflow solution to manage the front- and back-office processing.

This recommendation also supported the Commercial Bank's strategy to improve service for customers in its business banking segment, which covers a large number of small and medium-size enterprises (SME) and charity-sector customers. But improving customer service and reducing costs required transforming the bank's paper-based customer query process that relied heavily on manual processes. The previous system hampered the bank's ability to quickly respond to customers due to the many paper handoffs from the contact center to the back-office functions. This was further compounded by the extensive reliance on microfilm for document storage and retrieval. In early 2005, Alliance & Leicester decided to implement a state-of-the-art automated case management solution based on FileNet, a leading enterprise content management system which incorporates high-volume image management and business process management.

Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank selected Accenture to implement the new image and workflow capabilities because of its track record in business process re-engineering, its extensive industry knowledge and systems integration experience, which has helped financial institutions around the globe to achieve high performance. Alliance & Leicester also knew that it could benefit from Accenture's alliance relationship with FileNet, the company whose application would serve as the project's backbone.

Accenture oversaw all aspects of the implementation, including the FileNet image repository, volume management, scan, fax and workflow components and subsequent integration with Thunderhead, a centralized print capability. Working collaboratively with both Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank and FileNet, Accenture broke down the implementation into two major releases: the installation of the underlying image and workflow infrastructure by the summer of 2006, followed by the addition of extended case management and workflow capabilities by March 2007. The challenging implementation required skilled coordination among various parties including Accenture's Financial Services group and Accenture Information Management Services professionals who collaborated with the bank's technology group and FileNet.

Following the launch of its leading-edge imaging and workflow solution, Alliance & Leicester Commercial Bank achieved immediate content management benefits as follows:

• The digitization of all inbound "direct" customer correspondence (1,500 documents and 300 faxes per day).
• Shared visibility of customer inquiries across all areas of customer services, with access to the new system.
• Immediate access to check processing transactions and associated images (600,000 items per day).
• Automatic letter (fax and paper) generation (650 per day).
• Automation of processes within banking back- office functions.

Customer service has undergone an equally dramatic transformation: a "one touch" process enables a rapid response to the vast majority of inquiries, through a mixture of scripted and unscripted workflows. This has been achieved through better alignment of telephony systems, paper-based operations and back-office functions across the contact center, which has about 50 customer-facing contact center staff and more than 100 staff in total.

While the bank has improved both productivity and customer satisfaction, it has also reduced costs by automating processes, eliminating the need for microfilm and significantly reducing the need for document storage. With Accenture's help, Alliance & Leicester is positioning itself as market leader in direct banking for small businesses, on the path to achieving high performance.

To learn more, visit our Portals & Content Management Home Page or contact us.

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