A center of excellence (CoE) is the business equivalent of a lighthouse. A CoE team acts as a guiding light that aligns functions to business goals, centralizes and shares operational insights, and keeps a careful eye on the implementation of new technologies and strategic initiatives to make sure they’re moving in the right direction.
Buffeted by accelerating regulatory, trade, and technological change, more banks are building CoEs to install a dedicated team for picking out and rolling out operational optimizations. And a process intelligence CoE (PI CoE for short) is one surefire way to do that.
A PI CoE focuses on embedding and scaling a living digital twin of business operations throughout the banking organization. With this common language of how operations run, the bank can drive governance, technical deployment, value realization, and user enablement.
In practice, a banking PI CoE takes charge of things like mapping end-to-end data journeys for regulators, streamlining payment and onboarding processes, and supporting core banking modernization. One multinational bank identified €32 million in value from their PI CoE, in a single year.
To help you deliver maximum value while tackling your most urgent banking challenges, we’ve created a guide for any bank looking to build a successful PI CoE. It takes you from the basic ABC of starting and setting up a CoE, all the way through to the XYZ of scaling one. It’s filled with the kind of best practices and take-it-from-us tips you can only get from a company that’s spent years helping banks across the world build successful CoEs.
But before you get stuck into the main event, check out this compact field guide on what to expect as you start and scale your banking CoE.
Phase one of your bank’s CoE journey: Plan
When you’re setting up a CoE, the first thing you’ll have to do is answer some fundamental questions about how it’s organized and structured. So prepare to mull over the three Ws:
- Who should be involved in my bank’s CoE? There are six roles every banking CoE needs – a CoE lead, a subject matter expert (SME), a business value architect, a data engineer, a data analyst, and a change manager. Find out more about their unique roles and responsibilities in our full guide, and discover why having an influential executive sponsor in your corner is also critical.
- Where should my bank’s CoE sit in the organization? CoE ownership is essentially a contest between your CIO and your COO. The outcome depends on whether you want to make it easier to set up the relevant IT architecture, for example, or to identify opportunities from a business perspective. We weigh up the pros and cons in the full guide.
- What’s the right model for my bank’s CoE? Most banks begin their CoE journey with a centralized model that handles all key activities within a single, central team. They then evolve to a more advanced model with greater capabilities (more on that later) once the CoE becomes established.
Next come decisions about where to start. Which banking processes should you prioritize? There are four criteria your bank’s first PI CoE project needs to meet: Clear strategic relevance, optimization potential, technical feasibility, and stakeholder engagement. The process area you’ll arrive at will depend on your bank’s specific challenges and goals, but popular starting points include:
- Loan applications, servicing, and recovery
- Fraud investigation and incident management
- Complaint and dispute handling
Once you’ve got the logistical nuts and bolts out of the way, and pinned down your first PI use case, you can focus on getting a quick win under your CoE’s belt. To do that, you’ll want clear targets set out and ready-made resources to upskill your PI CoE team (Celonis Academy has everything you need).
Phase two of your bank’s CoE journey: Establish
With a successful PI CoE project or two in the bag, you’ll move into more seasoned CoE territory. Here, it’s all about building on those early wins.
You’ll need to take stock of whether you’re outgrowing the centralized CoE model you started with and if it’s time to transition to a hub-and-spoke or hybrid model. While you’ll still drive alignment and oversight from a central hub team, you may want to set up smaller CoE spokes in individual departments or domains – like customer lifecycle or financial crime – where specialized knowledge is crucial. If you’re a global bank you might set up regional spokes, providing the flexibility to adapt to local financial regulations.
Another important element of this phase is creating a strong governance structure by determining:
- Who should attend your weekly, monthly, and quarterly sessions, from your executive sponsor to your CoE lead (or spoke CoE leads if you have them).
- What the objectives of these sessions are, including reviewing progress, updating action plans, escalating issues, and showcasing successes.
With a clear governance framework in place, you’ll keep your bank’s CoE aligned on strategic targets and the progress of your PI journey on track.
Phase three of your bank’s CoE journey: Scale
Scaling your bank’s CoE isn’t just about making it more robust and complete, it’s about broadening its capabilities and maximizing PI adoption. That’s how the banking CoEs we’ve worked with have delivered by far the most value.
Some banking CoEs scale globally with new use cases, units, and departments. Others scale vertically into processes. Either way, once you reach this stage of your PI CoE journey, expect to bring more team members, especially subject matter experts, into the fold. You’ll want to look for ways to expand and inspire your bank’s process intelligence community, like arranging hackathons to identify promising process improvement use cases your organization can test out.
A sign of success to look out for here is a momentum shift from “pushing” PI further into the organization, to the bank “pulling” for more support from your CoE as appreciation of the value of process intelligence spreads.
You’re ready to dive into building a successful banking CoE
Now you’ve had a first look at what’s to come on your bank’s PI CoE journey, let’s put some meat on the bones.
Our full guide to creating a successful banking CoE helps you move confidently through each of the three phases, with success factors, insights from Celonis value engineers, and first-hand quotes from banks who’ve walked in your shoes. You’ll learn how to:
- Map your bank’s PI CoE journey
- Build the business case and offset CoE costs against CoE value
- Identify high-impact use cases to target with process intelligence
Download Create a banking Center of Excellence now to take your first (or next) steps treading this exciting frontier of value for banking organizations.