Improving processes in financial service organizations: where to begin?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to create actionable knowledge, thereby supporting and stimulating practitioners to improve processes in the financial services sector. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a case base of improvement projects in financial service organizations. The data consist of 181 improvement projects of processes in 14 financial service organizations executed between 2004 and 2010. Following the case‐based reasoning approach, based on retrospective analysis of the documentation of these improvement projects, this paper aims to structure this knowledge in a way that supports practitioners in defining improvement projects in their own organizations. Findings – Identification of eight generic project definition templates, along with their critical to quality flowdowns and operational definitions. An overview of the distribution of improvement projects of each generic template over different departments and the average benefit per project for each department. The generic templates give people with knowledge about the process under improvement the ability to use their knowledge effectively in the form of an improvement project. Originality/value – Due to increasing international competition, financial service organizations must continuously improve in order to secure a competitive advantage. This paper turns continuous improvement from an abstract concept into something tangible and achievable, by giving practitioners with local knowledge tried and tested templates to identify promising themes for process improvement, and to make effective project definitions.