International Banking Institution Dramatically Enhances Customer Service Efficiency with Ultimus

Ultimus, the #1 provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow software and solutions, with more than 1,600 customers worldwide, today announced that Fortis Bank Turkey, an international provider of banking and insurance services to personal, business and institutional customers, has used the Ultimus BPM Suite to automate an average of 40,000-50,000 process steps each day. As a result, the company has been able to significantly increase efficiencies across its customer service operations.

As the leading human-centric BPM platform, the Ultimus BPM Suite enables financial institutions to reduce cycle times and improve operational efficiencies related to call centers, loan processing, opening new customer accounts, managing fees, credit card applications, underwriting and policy applications. Like many organizations, Fortis Bank Turkey chose to implement a BPM platform that would allow greater visibility into how it automated and routed key business processes.

In the past, when Fortis Bank Turkey received a customer inquiry, it was routed manually through multiple internal departments, which was difficult to process and track and sometimes resulted in human errors. Over time, this created a number of inefficiencies in the Complaint and Request Management process, including unwanted bottlenecks that slowed down the ultimate completion of a customer request.

The bank also wanted to automate its credit application process. Although credit cards are one of the bank’s major income generators, they pose significant risks, especially if an incorrect decision is made during the process itself. One of the toughest tasks in such processes is gathering information about the background of applicants. Fortis Bank Turkey needed a BPM platform with a wide and flexible range of integration capabilities in order to accomplish this task. In addition, the use of Ultimus for sub-processes saved the bank from an exhaustive amount of work that otherwise would have to be done for each process, such as integration maintenance.

“The extensibility of the Ultimus BPM Suite made it easy to integrate the platform with Fortis Bank Turkey’s core banking systems, including credit card, credit bureau and CRM applications,” said Karl Freiheit, Vice President and General Manager EMEA of Ultimus. “Today, the bank has lowered risk and improved its standing with customers by optimizing and codifying critical business processes.”

By implementing the Ultimus BPM Suite, Fortis Bank Turkey has nearly eliminated time-consuming and error-prone manual processes, and can successfully automate and manage customer inquiries, complaints, credit applications and other key processes. With the Ultimus BPM Suite in place, the risk of human error is minimized due to the automation of particular steps, ensuring that agents do not deviate from the appropriate course of action. The software’s flexibility and ease of use has also enabled the bank’s business executives to develop new workflows in a very short amount of time, with minimum IT resources and support involved.

Another area that was important to Fortis Bank Turkey was the ability to manage its business process rules. In order to fine-tune its processes and stay in touch with the dynamics of the financial market, Fortis Bank Turkey needed to be able to quickly adjust its process rules. In a way, change management of process rules has been one of the most tiresome tasks for Risk Management and Credit Allocation Managers. The difficulty in managing rules is two-fold: keeping an accurate account of business rules and process rules, and changing the rules and promptly applying them to human business processes. With the Ultimus BPM platform, Fortis Bank Turkey has been able to achieve both tasks successfully, thereby saving the organization’s intellectual strength for designing new rules processes, which is the heart of Fortis Bank Turkey’s business.

About Fortis Bank Turkey

Fortis Bank Turkey is an international financial services provider engaged in banking and insurance. The company offers personal, business and institutional customers a comprehensive package of products and services through its own channels in collaboration with intermediaries and through other distribution partners. Fortis Bank Turkey ranks among the twenty largest financial institutions in Europe. Its sounds solvency position, its presence in 50 countries and its dedicated, professional workforce of 58,000 enable it to combine global strength with local flexibility and provide its clients with optimum support. For more information visit www.fortis.com

About Ultimus

Ultimus is the leader in human-centric, adaptive Business Process Management (BPM). Long recognized as an industry pioneer, Ultimus has automated more processes than any other BPM vendor worldwide. The company’s award-winning technology adapts to people, systems and change; is available in 16 languages; and is deployed by more than 1,600 customers around the world. Headquartered in Cary, NC, Ultimus has offices in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia with market presence in more than 80 countries. For more information, visit www.ultimus.com.