The survey of 300 senior executives from financial services companies found that 61% of respondents believe that reducing the unit cost of business processes will be the single biggest challenge facing financial institutions over the next five years.
The report, Better, faster, cheaper? Business process transformation in financial services, highlights the challenges posed by consolidation and new low-cost producers and the search for economies of scale.
“More often than not, reconfiguring business processes involves centralising processing in a shared services centre (either internally or in a utility owned jointly with other financial companies) or, increasingly, outsourcing to third-party providers,” the report says.
“Two-thirds (66%) of the survey respondents already employ internally shared services and over half (52%) outsource to locally based third parties.
“The survey suggests that these proportions will have risen to 92% and 79% respectively in three years’ time,” it says.
