Business Lending Fulfilment

Challenge

A major Australian bank had implemented a new operating model, core banking platform and workflow system in business lending fulfilment. Performance remained poor, creating significant tension between the front and middle office and urgency from senior leaders.

The objective was to improve the fulfilment process and reduce time-to-decision, across a national operation of around 600 people in fulfilment centres in every state.

Approach

Working with the bank’s internal process improvement team, we built on their single-team pilot, which focused on intercepting poor inbound quality, and expanded the scope to every team in the end-to-end process.

Earlier improvement attempts had included some of the same elements, but with design flaws that cut across fundamental process and operational principles. We addressed these, then rapidly designed, tested and refined the solution before a full national deployment within weeks.

The work focused on:

Inbound quality
Intercepting defects before they entered the process, with structured feedback loops to find and fix root causes.

Workflow logic
Redesigning how individual case portfolios were managed to reduce work fragmentation, improve prioritisation and first-in, first-out adherence, and clarify which cases were workable.

Performance measures
New metrics to drive productive behaviours and minimise distortion and gaming.

End-to-end flow
Daily balancing of capacity across the process, and a shift in focus from functional service levels to end-to-end flow, with matching changes to KPIs and operating rhythms.

Capability and standardisation
Upskilling staff and frontline leaders, and standardising processes to reduce variation and converge on better practice.

Team members involved: Peter Campbell.

This engagement was delivered prior to the establishment of Cinc. The experience and results described reflect work personally delivered by the team member identified above.