Precision and efficiency can make all the difference in a high-stakes business such as investment banking. As same-day trade execution, settlement, real-time advisory, and process transparency become the norm, time and speed are more than mere operational metrics. They are the deciding factors for customer success, compliance, and the final line of defense against market competition.
However, success with these factors was being held back for an Australian investment bank with $2.25 billion in assets under management. Straddled with manual processes and heavy physical documentation, the bank’s staff had to manually scan and read investment consent documents to manage client portfolios. Since these portfolios were not updated in real time, a major chunk of advisors’ bandwidth was dedicated to answering customer queries. While this preempted advisors from strategic activities, such as market analysis, the bank also risked non-compliance due to a lack of transparency or failure to execute customer instructions without undue lags.
The writing on the wall was clear: digitize the business or risk losing it.
The client turned to Persistent for a breakthrough.
From Paper Trails to Click-Away
Together, the bank and Persistent embarked on an end-to-end digital transformation, powered by Appian. This journey draws from a 16-year-long partnership between Persistent and Appian, helping clients leverage digital platforms and intelligent automation capabilities to deliver accelerated, innovative, and relevant services to their external and internal stakeholders.
Understanding the bank’s unique needs, Persistent leveraged the Appian platform to create portals for investors, borrowers, and introducer clients, empowering users with differing needs to manage, monitor, and control their accounts independently. Customers can now directly upload relevant documents, track application status, and oversee funds without advisors in the loop. This powered the bank’s vision for embedding customers deeper into investment decisions and lifecycles.
To digitize customer-employee interactions, Persistent deployed a shared mobile and web-compatible portal that further streamlined portfolio management with real-time updates. Customers and employees can collaborate through the same portal to manage portfolios from anywhere, anytime. An internal dashboard with role-based access enables advisors and bank staff to make data-backed decisions, bring timely and relevant insights to portfolios, and significantly improve potential returns.
Even with these successes, the real transformation happened under the hood through process automation, standardization, and orchestration. With Appian AI Skills capabilities, Persistent implemented an intelligent document processing (IDP) solution that optically captured information from investment documents and ported it into relevant portals, while an AI smart sorting app rationalized legacy portfolios to ensure uniformity across operations. With automated checks and hand-offs, the client’s internal system can scale with incoming customer requests while maintaining an audit trail for compliance with anti-money laundering practices and market surveillance guidelines.
The Digital Journey: Growing from Strength to Strength
The Appian Platform powered the bank’s digital transformation, and Persistent’s banking expertise connected the dots. We achieved a 23% decrease in customer queries as users took advantage of their portals, with only 6% of customers requesting an advisor’s help within a week of the rollout. This resulted from improved transparency, customer empowerment, and orchestrated processes that ensure precision and efficiency with significantly shortened application and request lifecycles. With digitized workflows and portals, the bank onboarded more than 700 new customers in half the time it took earlier. It now digitally manages over $2.25 billion in assets.
The digital platforms and IDP increased document processing accuracy by more than 95%, eliminating the scope for manual errors and allowing advisors to focus on higher-value work. The front-line team’s workload was reduced by more than 35 hours a week—critical time that was previously dedicated to manually studying and filing scanned investment documents.
The bank has streamlined compliance with applicable regulations with automated processes and standardized documents. With Appian’s intelligent automation and new digital services in its corner, the bank is now on an accelerated path to digital transformation. It has phased plans to onboard external portals for prospects while boosting the adoption and scalability of existing platforms.
