Oesterreichische Kontrollbank
            

The Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG (OeKB) is Austria's central provider of financial and information services to the export industry and the capital market. Its shareholders are commercial banks with headquarters in Austria.

OeKB holds shares in companies that operate in the credit insurance and financing, capital market, investment, development and tourism funding sectors. Together they form the OeKB Group.

For 75 years, OeKB Group has been supporting the Austrian economy by providing numerous services to companies and creating attractive conditions for the national economy and the export and capital markets. Furthermore, sustainability aspects such as development financing, services for the energy market and promoting investment in domestic tourism initiatives are playing an increasingly greater role. There's no doubt that OeKB sets high standards for how it handles risks and places great value on having a generic, overall view.

The bank’s answer to growing market pressures is a smart one: OeKB gave itself the task of elevating its processes to a strategic level using a modern tool while maintaining a groupwide overview of the risks. The underlying objective to improve operational excellence while remaining adaptable and fit for the future.

After an intensive selection process, these requirements led the bank to choose Software AG and ARIS. With integrated process governance and preset workflows, ARIS is the tool for strategic risk and compliance management, for rolling out policies and for process management. "We found the right solution with ARIS: It enables us to strategically manage processes and risks, it offers easy-to-use dashboards for a comprehensive overview, it's user-friendly and delivers a decentralized application without exorbitant costs," states Regina Janitsch, Senior Manager Organization and Process Management, OeKB Group

All processes under one roof—with ARIS

The final solution was carefully selected as part of a proof of concept (PoC). With Software AG's support, the bank then took approximately three months to define its requirements. OeKB subsequently decided to implement an integrated management tool that can handle the database-supported integration of their different requirements and merge the worlds of process and GRC management (governance, risk & compliance).

The special thing about ARIS is its integration of processes, risks and controls into a central enterprise management system as a single source of truth. ARIS manages to comprehensively present the bank's business processes in a complete overview and make the associated business aspects such as risks/controls and responsibilities visible on the process model level.

Many benefits for greater operational excellence

"People already feel that ARIS is making their job easier compared to how things were done before. In that context, we would also like to highlight the first-rate expert consulting we received from Software AG's Professional Services Team, who provided intensive support throughout," summarizes Janitsch.

In addition to capturing and classifying the non-financial risks—generic risks within the company as well as process-related risks in the Internal Control System (ICS)—ARIS delivers many benefits for the bank including user-friendliness and transparency. The risks for the entire Group can be displayed centrally via dashboards while subsidiaries can easily capture and evaluate their own risks at the push of a button without needing specialized knowledge of the tool.

What's more, ARIS provides business continuity and compliance. System gaps, time-consuming manual imports and exports of Excel files into the old centrally managed risk management tool and documents not saved in an audit-proof format are all a thing of the past. By integrating process and risk management, the bank can implement its strategic realignment and meet the strict regulatory requirements supported by tools. At the same time, OeKB is strengthening its standing with regulatory authorities as a smart company.

And the cost savings compared to alternative providers is appealing, of course. The license model and the easy, decentralized process modeling help the bank reduce costs overall and position itself as a leaner, more customer-centric organization. The first go-live for risk management was back in September 2020 with a total of 50 mapped processes and 300 risks. Over time, all of the ICS processes will be transferred into the process management solution.

All in all, OeKB is now smart and fit for the future, and is already thinking about the next steps toward measuring and managing processes. Process mining to increase process digitalization is also a focal topic. And with that, OeKB is on a steady chosen path to greater operational excellence!