SEB is one of the largest banks in Northern Europe that faced challenges with manual processes, lack of skilled resources, and security issues costing $50 million per week. An analysis found low productivity, lack of collaboration, and insufficient talent. The bank lacked key operational processes and needed to improve quality management, efficiencies, and innovation. The recommendation was to automate processes, use a single IT roadmap aligned with business needs, improve talent management, and adopt a multi-vendor strategy to gain efficiencies and reduce costs by 35% while increasing productivity, growth, and market share. Implementation led to double digit productivity growth, reduced costs, faster services, and higher customer satisfaction within a year.

1. Problem Overview
Established in 1972, SEB is one of the largest and most prestigious commercial banking groups in Northern
Europe. Last few year SEB has faced tightened resource constraints, acknowledged that its business process is not
automated and a lot of bottleneck on the way of growth. A reactive approach resulting in lost opportunities for
quantitative and qualitative improvements and a questionable return on investment. They were looking to
streamline processes, lowering the operational cost and incorporate core values into their day to day operation
system. Due to highly competitiveness in the market the company has decided an aggressive strategy to become
#1 in Northern European regions. The CEO of SEB was under pressure to increase market share, increase the rate
of adding new customers.
SEB’s IT needed to better alignment of IT with business requirements to keep up with changing customer needs.
Automation has become critical to SEB operations. IT staff took a close look at what manual tasks could be
automated so that it could keep the same level of administration even as the bank added more systems. A few
years ago, the company analyzed its business processes and found common business challenges.
Challenge
SEB CIO & CTO has to provide a secure and multichannel platform. The bank has experienced increasingly serious
problems associated with production operations. The most salient issues are (a) falling manufacturing productivity
(due to delay of new services in the market) and (b) increasing overtime costs for both line workers and
engineering staff. These operational management problems are related to one another (e.g., overtime costs affect
productivity measures). The probability, however, is that an underlying problem is the root cause of both
manifestations of the production problem.
There are numerous challenges such as manual process reduces productivity and operational efficiencies, delay of
delivery due to lack of skilled resources and slow recruitment process. And due to insecure, manual, incapability of
multichannel sales and non-integrated process the firm was losing 50 million SEK weekly.
Analysis
SEB was facing tremendous pressure with high operating and maintenance cost, lack of skilled resources, quality
issues (poor customer satisfaction, poor response time, and outage and security risks)
The deep analysis was based on the following approaches
Measure with the Current system – Analyze, If SEB’s Vision and Objectives can be accomplished with current
solution or not [address the major issues in to the steering committee], assess the current system and Identify the
gaps, issues, bottleneck and risks. Develop proper planning strategy, implementation strategy and review the
overall process.
The outcome of analysis produced that SEB was lacking process and operational excellence, low productivity due
to manual process, lack of collaboration, lack of enthusiasm, insufficient skilled staff and lack of knowledge
management process.
Debasis Chakraborty EMBA International Business School

2. Process
After analysis, we have found a number of process and operational issues such as Uncertainty – lack of correct and
meaningful information, Complexity – Need to process huge information for clear understanding, Ambiguity - lack
of conceptual framework, Equivocality – several contradictory frameworks.
In this financial Organization, I've seen operational sclerosis, the fault begins at the top of the organization —
those who decide how to allocate capital, measure performance, set promotions, and determine which
operational problems to fix and when.
What SEB was lacking? The SEB was lacking the following operational Processes such as Operational efficiencies,
change management and controls, Problem Management, asset Management, planning, 360 degree view of
customer, proper Quality control, standard and guidelines, efficient due diligence process, exit strategy and scaling
plan, risk and mitigation plan.
What are four key Strategic Processes that SEB needs to follow - Four key management processes are strategy
development and deployment, performance measurement, talent development, and operational problem solving.
Process Improvement Strategy - Identify the biggest bottleneck, Remove this bottleneck, continue the process
and find out new biggest bottleneck until the improvement goals are met (or, more likely, continually improve the
process throughput and cost).Introduce the best approaches and strategy from Six Sigma.
Recommendation
The recommendation to SEB was on Operational Efficiencies – By adopting business and process
automation, One IT Roadmap, blueprints, alignment with business and IT. Improved Quality Management and
Process – Such as high availability, response time and end-user satisfaction, lower the cost of ownership, Reduce
risks. Kaoru Ishikawa clearly stated that “As much as 95% of quality related problems in the factory can be solved
with seven fundamental quantitative tools." Innovation – Introduce emerging solutions with multichannel capability
[for example secured payment solutions integrated with Smartphone and social networks]. Collaboration -
Introduced offshore and onshore delivery model, which resulted in service efficiencies, 100% uptime, and high
throughput. Talent and knowledge management – By providing appropriate training, skill hiring, promote internal
leaders at all levels in the business and share knowledge resulted to increase employee productivity and
efficiencies. Demand Management – Use skill, talented Geo resources as required and quickly deploy them with
adopted multi-vendor strategy.
The recommended framework is a seamless integration between people, processes, and systems across the whole
enterprise.
Outcome
Within 6 months of implementation, our client SEB has achieved break-even, and one year after implementation, it
has achieved double digit increased employee productivity, reduced Operational cost [35% year to year], faster
service availability, improved operational efficiencies, high customer satisfaction, 25% growth with adding new
customer, increased market share and highest degree of regulatory and compliance. Reduce the number of
Debasis Chakraborty EMBA International Business School

3. operational staff by more than 60%, resulting in a 35% cost saving for the derivatives business. This significant cost
reduction delivers an extremely fast return on the investment.
"Our competitiveness—our ability to retain our global customers—depends on our ability to adapt just as fast
as the largest megabanks to our customers’ demands." - Bernt Eklindh, Global Owner, SWIFT payments
systems, SEB
"By providing seamless integration with our existing pension fund, insurance securities systems and legacy
applications the new frame work allows us to offer the right mix of products and services uniquely tailored to
each customer’s needs." Martins Freibergs, head of product and technology development, SEB
Debasis Chakraborty EMBA International Business School