Situation: Cognitive Group has been hired to look at back office operations of one of the world’s largest financial institutions for the fulfillment of commercial loans.

When the client requests a new loan or loan increase, the bank needs to update all of the information regarding the client, the financial risk, and the securities, to prepare new loan agreements, etc. Since this is a complex process, the work in the back office is allocated into specialized teams. Some teams are in charge of the securities; others are producing loan agreements, collecting fees, etc. All those teams have to do their work in perfect coordination to fulfill the client needs.

Any problems arising in this complex chain result in delay and losses. For each type of deal, there is a maximum delay to fulfill the request. The bank is using tracking software to manage the operations.

Issues: The software was very difficult to use and did not provide visibility.

• Each team had different console and could not see other teams files.
• Staff had to pass through 8 screens to complete the task.
• Staff did not know which stage the processing was at.
• They had to open additional screens to see the status or the priority of the request.
• They had to go to the last screen to see how many documents should be prepared.

Approach: Cognitive performed field studies using its human factors expertise. Cognitive looked at the operations, observing how people perform their tasks, found the issues related to the software, redesigned the software interface and tested it with users.

Cognitive used the best practices developed over many years of consulting for designing tracking software. Instead of providing different interfaces for different user teams, we provide one main interface with filtering possibilities for each team.

Results

• All teams had one main user interface filtered for the team processing the request.
• Each team could see the files of the other team.
• Instead of 8 screens, officers have to only pass through 2 screens to complete the task.
• On the main screen, staff can have full overview of the situation, namely:

1. Which team is processing the request (i.e. at which stage of processing is the request)
2. Which officer is processing the request.
3. The status of all requests.
4. Highlighted priority requests.
5. The number of required documents to be prepared for the request.

With the new design, officers have to do 11 steps instead of 63, which consequently saves time and reduces the risk of errors.