Gruppo BCC Iccrea was founded in 2019 following the Italian Credit Cooperative reform. While cooperative banks in Italy had previously been affiliated with a regional federation, the reform obliged them to join a national group. The Groups through the Parent Company, would be responsible for centralizing control functions and for executing a Direction and Coordination role with the target of unity of strategic direction, ensuring:
From day one, Gruppo BCC Iccrea faced the significant challenge of bringing coherence and consistency to the operations of its cooperative banks, which were using a wide range of different technologies, systems, and methodologies. “Many of the larger banks had well-established protocols for managing processes,” explains Chiara Cartocci, Organizational Specialist at Gruppo BCC Iccrea, “but the smaller institutions were generally less well structured.”
Overall, there was a lack of organic management of internal documentation, access restrictions, and significant variations in how similar processes were executed. Furthermore, many banks struggled to keep their processes updated in line with changing regulations or IT system upgrades.
Gruppo BCC Iccrea realized it needed an operational blueprint for process conformance across all its banks. This would drive the implementation of standardized processes across the group and enable collaboration between member banks to share best operational practices and ensure compliance. The challenge would be to motivate its members to change their daily habits and shift to a new mode of operation.
To map and manage its processes, Gruppo BCC Iccrea adopted ARIS, the Business Process Management & Analysis solution from Software AG. This decision was based on the positive experience of Federazione Toscana, a regional federation that was using ARIS before it was amalgamated by the group.
Initially, ARIS was used to detect the most effective processes already existing within the group. “By using process mapping, we were able to identify master processes that we could then adapt and roll out to all the banks,” explains Chiara Cartocci. The starting point was high-level processes such as opening or closing a bank account.
Gruppo BCC Iccrea then put together a team of 16 people to map the master processes in ARIS. Each master process was shaped to cover a broad set of use cases, based on interviews with different-sized banks and in collaboration with process owners. The team made the processes available to the different banks, supporting them to use ARIS to tailor the master process to their needs. “If we take the example of credit authorization limits,” says Chiara Cartocci, “a smaller bank might assign authorization responsibility to the director, while the same process could be handled by different business units in a bigger bank.”
Following customization, each bank published its processes on the group’s web interface, named KADMA (Knowledge and Document Management). Powered by ARIS, it offers end users a simplified view of processes—as flow charts or pdfs— and it is possible to navigate from one process to another through the process interfaces.
To further encourage the new way of working, Gruppo BCC Iccrea provided users with training in ARIS and raised awareness of the operational risks of non-compliance for each bank.
Since its foundation, Gruppo BCC Iccrea has used ARIS to map 150 master processes, which have become over 17,000 customized processes across the different banks. Every day, there are about 1,500 visits to the KADMA portal, indicating a relatively high rate of user adoption.
“The biggest benefit of ARIS,” explains Chiara Cartocci, “is that it’s given us a uniform approach to process management and a clear vision of compliance and controls across the group.” Today, every bank has process documentation constantly updated, and all processes and organizational structures are connected and inter-navigable. With a unique repository for all processes and organigrams, users can quickly access up-to-date documentation and the group can use the information to analyze and evaluate progress.
Within the web platform, special dashboards have been developed to generate reports on individual banks, helping to have a quick view of the grade of process adoption and to identify entities that might need extra support. Dashboards are also used to monitor compliance issues and enable audits. The group’s compliance, internal audit, risk management, and anti-money laundering departments can independently assess process adoption by the banks and investigate any customization they may have introduced. Similarly, KADMA makes it easier to perform specific extractions requested by inspectors from the European Central Bank or Italian Bank.
“ARIS has also become a tool for better governance,” says Chiara Cartocci. “The process repository allows us to immediately and precisely assess the organizational impact of changes in regulations or operations such as mergers and acquisitions.” Furthermore, Gruppo BCC Iccrea can use ARIS to evaluate efficiency gains, and the web interface is a valuable tool for spreading and sharing knowledge of the process model with different levels of the company.
With the objective of gaining further visibility on the operations of its members, Gruppo BCC Iccrea is evaluating a new SUPER dashboard.
“We’ll be able to track navigation habits by different users with even more precision,” says Chiara Cartocci. By collecting data from KADMA, the group will have a better understanding of operational excellence across the group—tracking KPIs, benchmarking process maturity, and monitoring progress.
“We’re looking to ARIS to power continuous process improvement,” says Chiara Cartocci, “and it’s exciting to see this come to fruition in terms of efficiency gains and compliance."
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