It’s not just about money in financial services
Information is imperative!

Financial services companies are using a variety of knowledge management solutions to locate documents and disseminate information across the enterprise, for improved contact center performance and to mine data from employee feedback surveys.

California Bank of Commerce, a $540 million financial institution, quickly embraced electronic technology for business processes, but the solutions for customer relationship management (CRM), business process management (BPM), reporting and knowledge management were all handled via different applications that didn’t always communicate with one another, leading to a variety of challenges.

Jay Leiner, the bank’s VP and technology manager, says, “We wanted to continue to grow, improve our transparency and decrease the time to close a loan.” That was impossible to do with silos of different information in different applications.

“We had tried to solve this problem on our own a few times,” Leiner continues. “In 2013, we implemented an electronic document system. As a bank, we need to have complete visibility into customer documents and loan documents.”

But the electronic document system wouldn’t populate the information across CRM, BPM and other non-document applications. So bank officials started looking at the nCino Bank Operating System and three other competitive products to find a workable solution. “A big deal was the flexibility of the platform,” Leiner explains. “We wanted to make sure that it was a Web-based tool and that we could see all of the documents and the given relationships [among different applications]. The neat thing about nCino is that it’s built on the Salesforce platform.”

“My job is to be skeptical,” Leiner adds. “We take a long time vetting that [a technology] is going to do what it says it’s going to do.” He and his team visited a community bank already using the nCino solution to ensure that it delivered as promised, which it did.

Ancillary work on incorporating the cloud-based operating system began in August 2014. A project team from nCino visited the bank to learn how it conducted business, including credit policies, approval limits and other bank policies, and to work on integrating the nCino solution with the bank’s core operating system. The pilot ensued at the end of 2014, with the nCino Bank Operating System going live at the beginning of 2015.

“The hardest part was getting our bankers who were already used to doing things another way to go all electronic,” Leiner says. Now there are no more issues with missing documents, which tended to be a bottleneck in the loan closing process.

“It’s in the customer’s interest to close loans as fast as possible,” Leiner adds. The bank is still integrating some of its other business processes with the nCino solution.

Reducing contact handling time

As a $55 billion full-services financial institution headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Huntington National Bank takes hundreds of calls every day via its contact center. None of the bank’s 410 contact center agents can be expected to be an expert on the nuances of all of its products and services, so the agents rely on a knowledge database for the information they don’t know in detail.

The bank’s legacy knowledge management system was difficult to navigate and didn’t offer easy uploading of reports, so the agents often didn’t use it, meaning delays in servicing customers, says Russ Wiegand, Huntington’s contact center analytics manager.

“It was very procedure-oriented. There was no context, and there was a lot of outdated knowledge floating around,” Wiegand says. If someone had a dispute, the agent might have to search through dozens of links to resolve it.

Huntington contacted IntelliResponse Systems in late 2013, and in early 2014 installed its Virtual Agent for agents solution, which enables contact center employees to quickly respond to customer queries. The bank also uses the IntelliResponse Virtual Agent for customers for customer self-service. The bank employs the application’s VOICES feature too, which enables agents to use natural language speech to look up information.