Achieving business process maturity in the Argentinian banking sector

Banco Supervielle was founded in 1887 and is the eighth largest private capital bank in Argentina. It has over 136 branches throughout Argentine territory, and more than 3,100 employees.

These days the world of banking forms a dichotomy between the neo banks—the digital, always-on challengers—and the traditional banks working hard to modernize legacy systems and improve customer responsiveness. Argentina is no different. And Banco Supervielle was traditional in every sense of the word.

Its heritage is impressive: Established some 130 years ago, Banco Supervielle is the eighth largest bank in Argentina. But it didn’t get there by resisting change. Recently, the bank embarked on a new phase in its development—to operationalize around delivering exceptional customer experience (1) and maximizing efficiencies (2). Outlined in the organization’s new strategy, these two pillars needed to be achieved with the lowest associated operating costs, in the cloud—fast. The bank’s Center of Process Excellence (CoE) knew this was going to take a powerful process intelligence tool that could offer the bank full visibility and control over E2E processes and get everyone working together. And there was only one solution they knew was up to it. Cristian Challier, COE Processes explains: “We needed to accelerate our journey to process maturity. We were looking for a tool that could do more than just design and map, it needed to help us model an enterprise-wide risk and governance framework. And we needed process intelligence to power simulation and mining around the results. ARIS from Software AG enabled us to give users, process owners, business leads and compliance experts intuitive access to a collaborative tool that could do it all.”

Work started to bring stakeholders up to speed on everything ARIS could do. The issue was that each department had a different way of capturing their own functional process. These were documented via a matrix of shared process control and improvements lists stored in excel sheets. While Visio and Narrative were the go-to tools for visualization, Banco Supervielle feared this would cause considerable delay. But with ARIS’ import accelerators, it wasn’t long before 947 (as-is) processes were visualized in rough form.

In fact, over the course of doing this, ARIS also helped the CoE identify 300 processes that were missing entirely and had never been documented. This was causing unseen issues like redundancies, duplication of effort, and service delays.

Next, the CoE needed to ensure that everything was working seamlessly in the cloud. The CloudOps teams found the implementation side straightforward enough to do it in-house. And because of the partnerships Software AG has with hyperscalers, Banco Supervielle could use Azure, AWS or a cloud provider of choice. It’s up to them.

“But let’s rewind for a second,” Challier says. “The real advantage of using ARIS early in our journey is that before we proceeded to map and analyze all these processes properly, we could align them to our strategic plan which we’d set up in ARIS. This plan had very clear KPIs like boosting customer experience of product delivery, improving staff performance metrics, and establishing a solid risk and compliance framework. With this as our north star in ARIS, everything we mapped was done in the context of our big strategic picture on operational excellence.”

The project has progressed fast and there has been help all the way. “We’ve had great support from our CSM (Customer Success Manager),” Challier says. “She explained the functions and capabilities of ARIS and has guided us at all times.”

Now, with admin, designer, concurrent and simulation user numbers up, and 1,067 processes mapped, attentions are being turned to measuring KPIs and optimizing processes as part of the Bank’s focus on continuous improvement. It’s a little early to share specific metrics but with the risk and compliance framework firmly established in ARIS, there are qualitative results particularly in the area of good governance and the customer journey: 

Compliance and risk mitigation: “We used to spend 10 days minimum gathering the information that the Central Bank required from a compliance perspective (procedures, objectives, scope, date and owner of process, flow diagrams etc.). Now, we’re optimistic that we’ll get this down to only five days,” says Challier. On top of this, the CoE also get alerts via the system so they can intervene when a process is in danger of underperforming. They can see which individuals are following a process closely and have even created a kind of gamification between departments to see which ones have the highest process performance rating.

Customer experience: Clients continue to be front and center of everything at Banco Supervielle. Challier explains, “We believe that good process management focusses 100% on the client. Our philosophy is that behind each client’s need there must be a process that satisfies it.” And it’s working out that way. Take the recent use case of launching Mortgage Loans. As the first private bank to enter this market, there is a lot of fresh regulations and new processes to contend with. ARIS has helped with the modeling side of things here—providing an optimized E2E process landscape that follows best practices and uses insights from past performance. 

As Christian Challier looks to the future of process excellence at Banco Supervielle, one thing’s for sure—it’s about establishing a culture of operational excellence across the organization. Gradually, the CoE are rolling out ARIS access to business leads—not just process experts. “Even the CEO will get a log in over the next few weeks,” she says. There’s also the intention to look into deploying Process Mining more seriously across the bank’s process architecture. “ARIS is a full process intelligence suite,” says Challier. “Until now we’ve only used a fraction of its capabilities. With design and governance established, the CoE will be looking to navigate uncertain times in the banking world using GenAI to analyze its process data and automate around being a tomorrow bank. There’s nothing traditional about that.”