How Wells Fargo boosted productivity and customer experience in a complex system landscape with Celonis

People, processes and lots and lots of systems. That’s how Gautam Oza, VP, Head of Process Transformation & Intelligent Automation at Wells Fargo described the company’s highly-complex operating environment during a fireside chat at the Celonis World Tour 2023 stop in New York.

Oza was at the event to share how the 171-year-old financial institution uses Celonis EMS to deliver higher productivity, shorter cycle times and a better customer experience, while also ensuring data security and regulatory compliance. He was joined on stage by his colleague Shailesh Rajpoot, VP, Process Intelligence at Wells Fargo, and Patrick McHugh, Lead Value Engineer at Celonis.

In describing the situation at Wells Fargo before Celonis, Oza said:

“Wells Fargo in itself has a very well established business process management framework. … The conventional way of doing that management framework was onerous. It depended a lot on the SME knowledge. It depended a lot on anecdotal information. … Like you require SMEs to walk in a room and put the sticky note somewhere.”

Wells Fargo began working with Celonis in 2019 and currently has around 30 EMS implementations across the bank in areas such as complaints management, credit card claims and lending. The bank is looking at risk and control compliance and talent acquisition processes as future use cases.

From left to right, Patrick McHugh, Shailesh Rajpoot and Gautam Oza at Celonis World Tour 2023

Cloud features with a hybrid approach

One of the key topics discussed by the trio was Wells Fargo’s hybrid Celonis setup. Oza said the bank is executing on a very clearly defined cloud strategy, but strict data governance requirements mean that some data needs to stay on-prem at present. Celonis worked with the Wells Fargo team to create an innovative hybrid solution that keeps the bank’s raw business data on-prem and sends “transformed information” to the cloud. Rajpoot said:

“We challenged Celonis. They partnered so well that today, as we stand, we have pretty much gotten the core cloud features in our hybrid. Case in point, Action Engine. Case in point, the email alerting and notifications. Case in point, the Business Views, the knowledge models. We brought all that into our hybrid environment.”

However, the bank isn’t sitting still. Rajpoot said Wells Fargo is “going very big” on increasing their cloud footprint. EMS cloud migration is vitally important to that journey and the team is already working with Celonis to make it happen.

Editor’s note: Action Engine has been replaced with Action Flows, and Business Views are now Celonis Ecosystem Apps.

Focus on technology, partnerships, and value

When Oza and Rajpoot were asked to share factors for their success scaling Celonis at Well Fargo, the pair focused on technology, partnerships, and value.

“What we have realized through our journey is number one, embrace the technology,” said Rajpoot. He encouraged the audience to approach process mining with an open mindset and use it to create a blueprint for their systems.

Second, Rajpoot said their process mining efforts would not have succeeded without partnerships, both internal and external.

“The in-house partnership within a bank is very, very important, business and IT,” he said. “Within IT also, the enterprise architecture, the data governance, the InfoSec teams, require a very, very tight partnership to make this a success.”

Third, both Rajpoot and Oza stressed the importance of delivering business value and mapping that value to the technology very clearly.

“We can continue innovating, we can talk about new features, but [how] does that translate into business value?” said Rajpoot.

“You have to wow the business and the tech leadership so that the business case writes itself,” added Oza. “You cannot invent a business case after you’ve [brought] the product on.”

SEE: Wells Fargo at Celosphere: The Future of Banking Excellence

More from World Tour 2023

World Tour 2023 features 10 stops around the world including Munich, Milan, San Francisco, Madrid, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, London, Paris and Chicago. Each additional stop features Celonis ecosystem partners, customers and process experts from across industries sharing best practices and knowledge.

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• Celonis World Tour 2023: Everything you need to know

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• Celonis brings process intelligence to every business user with LLM for PQL Generation

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• Celonis announces next-generation, MRI process mining technology with Process Sphere™

Bill Detwiler

Editor, Technical Content & Ecosystem

Bill Detwiler is Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, where he hosted the Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET’s popular online show. Bill is an award-winning journalist, who’s covered the tech industry for more than two decades. Prior his career in the software industry and tech media, he was an IT professional in the social research and energy industries.