Celosphere 2022: Credibom notches value in overall process cycle time, rework

Credibom, a consumer bank based in Portugal, is just starting its process mining journey, but has expansion plans after seeing early value realized.

Speaking at Celosphere 2022, Hugo Pontes, Head of Digitalization and Transformation at Banco Credibom, walked through the company's process mining efforts for credit underwriting. Credibom is a unit of Credit Agricole Group.

Credibom, which has 850,000 customers and 450 employees, delivered its first Celonis implementation in 2020 and notched quick wins in 2021, said Pontes. In 2022, Credibom launched a Center of Excellence (CoE) to bring on more process mining use cases as well as process simulation.

Pontes explained that Credibom's business revolves around deciding what consumers are creditworthy, financing loans, fraud detection and document management. Within those big processes there are many subprocesses.

For Credibom, KPIs revolve around time, cost, and quality. Pontes said the bank focused on the time it took to get to a yes decision, time to cash, first time right, rework rates and abandon credit files rate.

Pontes walked through a series of use cases and value generated via Celonis. Here's a look:

Time to cash: Credibom noticed a spike in inefficiency at a home equipment partner. Time to cash increased 5x and process variants increased 11x. Using process mining, Credibom was able to confirm the efficiency of process changes, address variants and bring KPIs back in range.

Contract time: The time to receive manual signed contracts increased and Credibom didn't know why. Using process mining, Credibom was able to remove a bottleneck and improve the time dramatically.

Decision time: Credibom saw a 15% increase in the time to make a first decision. Using process mining, the bank noticed that credit file complexity increased and that took longer to analyze. With process mining, Credibom was able to determine that there was no significant change in first holder risk. The culprit was a change in demand in profiles adding a required guarantor.

Pontes said that the value of process mining is using data to fix problems before they become bigger ones. In addition, process mining speeds up the time to insights and helps address the root causes behind the KPI fluctuations.

Credibom saw a 5% to 10% improvement in overall cycle time and removed more than 10,000 rework activities from processes.

Pontes said Credibom is still early in its process mining journey, but has seen enough to lay out the following next steps:

• Extract more value out of underwriting processes.

• Expand Celonis use to process simulation and Celonis EMS Action Flows.

• Target additional processes such as credit collections and IT service management.

• Share best practices and knowledge with Credibom parent Credit Agricole Group.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.