Tom was tasked to establish how effectively the operational improvement lean and risk teams were working together across 4 major back office corporate insurance, risk and wealth bank call centres located across the UK. With substantial operations and call centre experience Tom easily engaged with the senior and local operations people identifying the culture, their capability, and missed opportunities. Finally reporting back to central director of risk management at the bank. The seniority of experience brought from a wide variety of experiences, enabled Tom to identify the cultural challenges and management challenges to get the business improvement tools and targets right.

Impact on the business / bottom line

Within 2 weeks Tom identified 40% of process steps could be eliminated – as most “risk management” process steps were completely non value added. in some areas delivering a realisable 87% efficiency improvement . Tom scoped the opportunity to pragmatically deploy leading edge business process in a these locations to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of business processes and risk management controls.

Overall contribution / achievement of objectives

The scoping exercise was delivered to the bank director of risk, on time in 6 days. We identified the issues and shortcomings of the current risk management, cultural and steps required to effect the change. The internal bank capabilities were benchmarked against best in industry standards, and 6m program identified to get the lean and risk management activity back on track to deliver the revised targets, motivational and service improvements.

Working style

These improvements were as a result of challenging the “untouchable risk steps in the processes” that had become over time a solution without a problem, and a complete waste. Culturally when issues occurred rather than challenge the effectiveness of the bank risk processes normally another non value adding step was superimposed on top compounding the issue. The
tools and techniques came from lean and six sigma tool set and were applied with pragmatism, and with respect for where the culture and skills were at the time.

Leadership / people management skills

Tom got to grips with the analysis and collected the data working alongside the client team, quickly made sense of the operational, management and risk management improvement opportunities.