Client Situation

Our client is a commercial bank in Oman, with assets of over USD 10 billion. the bank serves over half a million customers and has a branch network across 60 locations. It has both conventional & Islamic windows and is one of the oldest banks in Oman. It provides best-in-class consumer & commercial banking services for its retail, corporate and institutional clients. In view of the changing digital landscape in Oman, the bank engaged Cedar to assist with process & organization transformation.

Cedar’s Approach

In this program, Cedar was mandated to reimagine key business processes and provide an overview of industry practices in organization design. This is how Cedar went about it:

  • Cedar assessed the current processes and conducted detailed workshops with ~50 stakeholders to understand current pain points
  • Determined the potential areas of process transformation across digitization, centralization & automation
  • Reimagined key processes with high impact based on industry practices & aligned them to the current bank context
  • More than 80 initiatives were identified to achieve reimagined process and 30 initiatives were identified as quick wins
  • Determined estimated investments based on the identified initiatives
  • Prioritized initiatives based on criticality, complexity, automation opportunities
  • Reviewed current organization design across multiple executive levels & identified areas divergent to industry practices
  • Analysed ~70 organization market structures across GCC & local banks & highlighted ~30 relevant structures from the industry
  • Determined key principles for end-state organization design
  • Determined cost optimization opportunities based on loading, reimagined processes & organization design

Outcome

The program resulted in reimagined key business processes and cost optimization opportunities, as well as:

  • Enhancements in customer interaction model for branches with reimagined processes
  • Lean operating structure with the introduction of new roles & merger of earlier roles
  • Introduced new elements in branches to enhance the customer experience for retail & corporate customers with reduced TAT
  • Enhanced control & governance enabled via process automation through system enhancements
  • Realignment of resources resulting in potential financial savings for the bank

Relevant Client Cases