How to design customer-centric processes in the banking industry

Banks and other financial services providers continuously claim to offer customer-oriented services, yet they still focus on delivering products instead of providing solutions to their customers’ needs. For instance, banks offer business customers only products and services that solve isolated problems, such as liquidity, financing, and investment services, and fail to reflect the intrinsic requirements of business clients, such as procurement, order fulfillment, and sales. Hence, customers are rarely fully satisfied with banking services. Consequently, the consistent alignment of financial services to customer processes becomes increasingly important for enhancing the competitiveness of banks. This paper will present the design of a customer-centric business process model, which allows banks to closely align their business processes with those of their customers and as a result achieve a high level of customization and to provide a new spectrum of services that add value to the clients. The sample that will be analyzed in this paper will comprise of small and mediumsized enterprises.