BNP Paribas: Improving the Global Client Onboarding Process

BNP Paribas is a leader in global banking and financial services.  Present across Europe through all its business lines, the group has four domestic retail banking markets: France, Italy, Belgium and Luxembourg. It also has one of the largest international networks, with operations in more than 80 countries and 204,600 employees. Its revenue in 2010 exceeded €43 billion.

To achieve its goal of becoming a top-five investment bank, BNP Paribas recognized that it would need to overhaul its capital markets division’s client onboarding process. The existing process was highly siloed—legal, risk, front-office and due diligence teams did not have a view of what the others were doing, and thus no one had an overall view of the existing end-to-end process. As a result, onboarding was too cumbersome and many clients were unable or unwilling to complete it. This interfered with the bank’s ambitious growth objectives.

BNP Paribas needed to streamline the way it onboarded new clients by looking at the process from end-to-end and identifying key issues related to people, processes and technology. To achieve this, the bank turned to Accenture.

Accenture gathered functional data in London, Paris, Hong Kong and the US to understand the bank’s current-state processes and systems—departmental interactions, wait times, work capacity and throughput volumes were all documented. The team used a diagnostic tool that incorporated knowledge accumulated over more than a decade of project experience to assess the maturity of the bank’s capabilities against industry standards.
 
Accenture created an interactive process-analysis tool that allowed users to visualize the existing situation by navigating process flows and procedure-level data. Based on its assessment, Accenture prioritized key issues and identified opportunities for change—opportunities that represented hundreds of millions of Euros in revenue lift.

BNP Paribas is scaling several of Accenture’s recommendations and implementing them globally across the organization.

Once these strategies are implemented, information will be shared more effectively across the organization, providing more visibility to the client and the bank. BNP Paribas can expect:

• Improvements in cycle time
• Improvements in throughput capacity
• Revenue lift
• Cost reduction

These more efficient processes will help BNP Paribas bring in new clients, moving them closer to achieving their growth objectives and improving an already solid reputation in the marketplace.