Client Situation
Our client is one of the oldest privately owned banks in the United Arab Emirates. The bank offers a comprehensive range of banking services including corporate, retail, international banking and treasury and capital market services. The client also has a presence in twelve countries including Europe, US, Asia, and Africa. Spread across 33 branches, the bank has an asset book of approximately $40 billion as of 2019. In the case of this project, Cedar worked with the client to run a Business Process Reengineering Program to focus on elements that drive most value to customers and augment profitability and market competitiveness.
Cedar’s Approach
In this program, Cedar was mandated to redesign the bank’s processes to enhance customer value, competitiveness, and profitability.
- Prioritized process by drawing a company-wide process map.
- Reviewed existing process data and current reviewing efforts and defined the start and end points of low-level processes.
- Identified a list of process issues requiring improvement.
- Issued preliminary list of initiatives and identified key statutory and internal reporting requirements.
- Conducted an activity-based costing analysis to gauge profitability and importance of product segments applying Cedar’s expertise and best-in-class principles and practices.
- Designed a corporate process strategy, developing process maps while drawing new ones.
- Generated a list of initiatives and screened for viability, feasibility, and compliance with statutory, reporting procedures.
Outcome
This program resulted in the successful reengineering of the bank’s business processes giving the client a clearer idea of customer and product profitability to drive business strategy.
- Realigned the trade finance, contracting and real estate finance divisions, and relocated international responsibility.
- Improved processes in the case of credit proposals and short form credit proposals.
- Rightsized credit and credit administration through enhancement of authority levels and removal of review duplication.
- Created a new structure for the high net worth (HNW) and private banking team.
- The recommendations resulted in the operating cost and FTE of the Corporate Banking Group to drop by 37%.