Compliance "Provability" Achieves a Whole New Level

I was given pause recently when hearing a client tell me that they were ‘throwing bodies at the problem’ of putting the bank into position to be able to withstand upcoming audits. “What are all those people going to be doing?” I asked, naively. Turns out that even when the bank has expensive, high-tech systems in place to manage collections inventory, decisioning, letters, auto-dialing, email, text messaging, and IVR messaging…. they still need to manually reconstruct a view of each customer’s experience with the bank. These hoards of staff he mentioned were taking data from all the disparate systems and sources – they HAVE all the data, he assured me – and creating a normalized data set that then could be combed to find all instances of a particular customer’s experience and “paste them together” in a manner that was responsive to their audit examiner’s request. 

Proving a negative (“show me, by walking us through the experience of at least 100 customers, that your systems and people are consistently executing the policies and practices that you assured us are in place for your bank, 100% of the time”), it turns out, is much harder for the bank than it is for the examiner to find the one exception to the rule. The examiner therefore holds the high ground, until we can IN ONE PLACE, under the control of one system, easily step them through the entire experience of as many customers as they want to see, any time. And if we can also show them the strategy-writing and maintenance process we are following at the same time, in the same system… we win. CMC’s CredAgility offers just such a system, and with it the granularity needed to “provably” report on all activities at the individual account or customer level.

Prospects are always asking us to quantify the value of CMC’s comprehensive customer experience management automation platform. Viewed solely through the lens of staff avoidance, the savings can be very substantial during the peak staffing demands typically associated with an audit, and significant (if lower than at audit times) by making ongoing customer-facing business processes more efficient. There is also the effectiveness gain that occurs when a unified strategy is executed and customers’ experience improves, resulting in more resolutions: higher collections, higher issue resolution rates with less re-work needed, increased pull-through on complex processes like loan modifications. But the greatest value comes in the form of eliminating the dread fear of what an examiner might find and how much the ensuing enforcement action might cost the bank…