Did you ever hear about the bank clerk who accidentally transferred $293 million (£222 million) from the bank to a private account? It’s a dramatic example, but the truth is, human error causes accidents, puts the bank at risk, and wastes valuable time, and it’s no different in a bank’s IT department.

Banking IT departments face a lot of challenges, especially as technology continues to evolve at lightning speed. One of these challenges is “technical debt, or the lack of legacy system modernization, which is a huge impediment to transformation,” according to Deloitte. “Another is the sorry state of data, which can prevent banks from realizing the full potential of investments in new technologies.” These challenges cause chaos: wasted time, blind and slowed decision-making, and lack of communication among bank departments. Here’s how workflow automation software can turn that chaos into order.

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Time-Wasting Becomes Seamless Automation

Too many IT departments in banks are wasting time and increasing risk as they toggle back and forth between disparate systems. Then, when it’s time to analyze how operations are performing and where IT can improve workflow and processes, it’s a nightmare to dig through siloed data and then try to piece it all together so that they can tell a good story to executives and the board.

Bank IT departments need one source of action and truth to give them answers and solutions— right now. They need a platform that can handle all IT requests, automating and consolidating what used to be a long list of cumbersome, headache-inducing manual tasks. ServiceNow, for example, handles all IT requests and resolution tasks in one platform. No toggling back and forth. No digging around for historical data to try to figure out ticket status.

Platforms like ServiceNow speed up time to resolution, so employees can focus on doing their jobs, not on fixing IT issues that are keeping them from their daily responsibilities. For example, Danske Bank used ServiceNow to automate the detection of service disruptions, the provisioning of assets, and remediation. This helped them reduce high-priority incidents by 93 percent and increased their time to restore services by a factor of six. In the end, less time dealing with IT issues means more time delivering a better, more competitive, and more memorable customer experience.

Blind Decision-Making Becomes Confidence and Full Visibility

Disparate systems that don’t communicate or integrate with each other don’t just waste time: They also make it difficult to make confident decisions about IT efficiency. For example, some IT departments may simultaneously be using Jira, EasyVista, BMC, and even inflexible and nonscalable home-grown systems. With data coming from multiple systems, it’s difficult to know where IT processes could be more efficient, what you could do to improve, and what the priorities should be.

IT departments need a solution that offers full visibility and communication between functions. Platforms like ServiceNow allow IT staff to react to issues but also uses predictive analytics so that they can head off issues before they become a major disruption in the daily flow of things.

After Danske Bank implemented ServiceNow, for example, all IT service requests became more visible, vastly improving the internal user experience.

“Our service management used to be an inefficient patchwork of data, processes, and tools,” says Jacob Elfving, development manager, IT operations at Danske Bank. “The Now Platform gives us complete visibility of our infrastructure and services, with complete control over our service management approach. This means better insights and more robust business decision-making.”

An IT Platform Becomes a Bank-Wide Solution

IT is a great place to test out a solution and see if it could improve operations across the entire bank. Other departments, too, waste time toggling from one system to another. Comprehensive workflow automation platforms like ServiceNow are designed to improve IT operations using best practices like ITIL and then expand from there and improve operations in all departments. ServiceNow brings the entire workflow ecosystem onto one robust and powerful platform so employees can work better, faster, and smarter. Ultimately, these automation solutions improve the customer experience as staff members spend less time dealing with manual tasks and more time on projects that improve what matters most.

A few things that matter most in a commercial bank are visibility, transparency, and efficiency. As all bank functions move in this positive direction, workflows become connected from department to department. This connectivity allows for cross-function efficiency and improves collaboration, communication, and insight.

At Crossfuze, we’ve found that when our banking partners implement ServiceNow ITSM, communication and collaboration among departments across the bank improve. The benefits of a comprehensive workflow-automation solution go beyond the work itself: It also improves employee work experience and customer satisfaction.

Banks face many competitive pressures, some of them self-imposed. For example, using a multitude of disparate systems and tools puts the competition at an advantage. Banks need to consolidate IT operations onto a single platform so employees can spend less time with them and more time on launching new products and services that build a tighter connection with the bank client. Banking operations have changed. Shouldn’t IT operations in this digital era change as well?

Reach out today to learn how Crossfuze can make implementing ServiceNow an easy next step for empowering the IT department at your bank to be the best it can be.