With more than 160 branches across Australia, this leading regional bank operates several brands offering a diverse range of products and services for personal and business customers.
Over the past decade, the bank has undergone continual transformation, with several acquisitions, expansions, and leadership changes. While maintaining its position in a radically shifting market, the bank is undergoing widescale digital transformation.
Cost and performance optimisation imperative
Motivated by constantly changing market conditions, the bank sought to identify opportunities for operational efficiency and cost optimisation from its current vendors. The organisation recognised the importance of efficient portfolio governance and supporting operating models as crucial elements for ongoing transformation.
Further, a recent mandate to cut costs by 20% added to their willingness to try a new cost optimisation approach. The bank required a close examination of business challenges and a comprehensive view of prioritised focus areas to address performance gaps and generate cost savings as part of its future strategic roadmap.
A shift in banking operations
As a trusted advisor to the bank for many years, DXC Technology was engaged to support this initiative. DXC’s Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) provided a rapid eight-week discovery program to deliver a diverse range of cost optimisation, cost avoidance and productivity-oriented solutions for implementation across the bank.
The DTC offers a rapid approach to solving complex problems and enabling innovation with the speed of a start-up and the scale of an enterprise.
Collaborating with the customer and a network of partners, DXC co-creates digital products, services and processes designed to realise value, deliver cost benefits and improve business outcomes. To develop technology-enabled solutions, teams consider all business, process, service and customer experience (CX) elements. As a technology and partner agnostic provider, DXC also leverages the customer’s existing or planned technology stack to ensure the most cost-effective outcome.
To help establish priorities, DXC’s multi-disciplined DTC team collaborated closely with the bank’s executives and staff to develop a common purpose, collectively mapping internal perspectives and high-level priorities for further exploration. Comprehensive reviews across each area were completed with multiple stakeholder interviews and workshops conducted with senior executives, customer-facing and back-end team members.
Taking a holistic approach, utilising design thinking, and leveraging a rich suite of frameworks, strategic consulting tools, practices, and industry benchmarks, DXC tailored a strategy to deliver maximum value in the shortest sustainable lead time.
Instead of siloed views, this approach helped DXC and the bank’s executives gain a more comprehensive and end-to-end view of the financial organisation’s challenges and potential improvements. More than three-quarters of the engagement stemmed from the internal people on the ground completing the work daily.
Strategic priorities across six key areas
Eight focus areas were initially identified - all examined through three primary lenses:
- People: Changes to roles, responsibilities, skills and knowledge across the bank.
- Process: Cost optimisation opportunities identified through process and governance transformation to reduce waste and increase efficiency.
- Technology: Tools and systems considered to save costs and increase productivity
Six focus areas were then selected for this engagement:
- Portfolio governance: Examining the bank’s operating model through the lens of program management.
- Change management: Examining how change is initiated and delivered within the organisation.
- Cloud platform and operations: Seeking opportunities in the cloud platform and operations space.
- Service desk: Considering how IT support is provided to employees and identifying opportunities to reduce and streamline interactions.
- CX platform: An employee experience platform designed to integrate multiple systems into a single pane of glass operating model.
- Product and pricing: Taking a business outcome-driven approach to delivering personalised products.
Working from top to bottom to hear from and observe people doing the work helped DXC map solutions into each focus area against the required effort and likely impact. This formed the basis of a series of cost-optimisation matrices that enabled easy identification of quick wins, incremental initiatives, foundational investments and major projects.
The approach also considered the complexity of the necessary change management (OCM), which is a significant driver of success. Two remaining areas, storage and application management services, were removed from the final report since they were more commercially focused discussions that didn’t sit effectively under this commercially agnostic project.
DXC built several views to organise and interpret the volume of solutions by savings and complexity with close involvement from the bank’s executive leadership team to align on agreed recommendations. Regular workshops and showcases (check-ins) throughout the engagement enabled alignment across the bank and DXC teams to produce a final phased roadmap. Working in sprints provided space for the DXC team to discuss learnings and gain the bank’s guidance on the next steps, which included dig deeper, pivot to another area, or move on quickly. This helped ensure time and effort was dedicated to the right areas, with rapid progression to areas with the most potential.
Engagement artefacts presented solutions at varying levels of detail to cater for a wide range of stakeholder perspectives, with linkages and dependencies shown where relevant. This included a comprehensive Insights Report detailing each cost optimisation solution with an explanation and guidance on the next steps, savings calculations, complexity estimations, delivery time, and change rating (OCM viewpoint).
Where possible, DXC proposed solutions that would save the bank money without requiring substantial dollar or time investments or other complex requirements.
Success in the wake of transformation
In just eight weeks, a rapid discovery program delivered a diverse range of cost optimisation, cost avoidance and productivity-oriented solutions for implementation across the bank. DXC iterated, defined and quantified 61 solutions that could be operationalised quickly across six focus areas with total anticipated savings of $25.7M.
Several views interpreted and organised the volume of solutions by savings and complexity, with recommendations for the first year totalling $11.5M in savings.
Additional soft benefits and productivity gains were not included in the estimated savings figures since there was no way of substantiating clear and precise figures, and DXC didn’t want to promise anything that could not be accurately measured.
Opportunities and estimated cost savings included:
- Portfolio governance: 10 opportunities with $1M+ p/a savings
- Change management: seven opportunities with $1M p/a savings
- Cloud platform and operations: 13 opportunities with $6M p/a savings
- Service desk: 14 opportunities with $1.04M p/a savings
- CX platform: four opportunities with $590K+ p/a savings
- Product and pricing: three opportunities with $16M+ p/a savings
Within weeks of the report being delivered, the bank reset its PMO and Agile organisational structures and commenced quick-win improvements
The Chief Information Officer at the bank commented on the success, “The engagement has been positive with a clear and well-articulated approach. We really appreciate the work that the entire DXC team have done.”
Future-proofing operations to stay competitive and relevant
The strategic roadmap prepared by DXC provides the bank with quick wins, incremental changes, and foundational investments to follow over the next year. DXC is now advising on governance and risk, offering PMO as a service and re-aligning its Agile delivery.
