UniCredit Drives Globalized Services for Customer Experience

McKinsey is not one to overlook a crucial trend. I was delighted, therefore, to see a recent "Insights" post titled: "Creating a business integrated services company: an interview with UniCredit’s Paolo Cederle. What's significant about this for me, is not that a bank, in this case one in my home country, has set up a shared services organization – you and I have known for a long time that the business case for enterprise-wide effectiveness weighs heavily in favor of the shared services model. No, what’s significant is that it's being headlined globally by McKinsey. There is nothing that says more clearly or more loudly: "Running business services as a partner to your business units is the correct strategy for any competitive company today." It safeguards my job and yours, and it bodes well for an exciting future within business services. So what is Paolo Cederle doing? He launched UniCredit Business Integrated Solutions in January of 2012, to consolidate – if you can believe it – the 16 separate UniCredit services companies that were in existence prior to that. UniCredit had grown through acquisitions, and the resulting duplication in services centers lay at the root of its fragmented support system. Today, the group has 11,000 staff across 11 countries and manages a cost base of €2.5 billion. The main thrust of the transformation, he tells McKinsey, is to improve the customer experience – specifically, to deliver "faster, more flexible, innovative products and services." The banking industry, perhaps more than most, knows how important it is to hang on to customers, and how difficult it is to win new ones. Of course there is also a cost consideration – Cederle says he'll save 16% in services by 2015. Faster service in this case also means smoother. In the past, operations, IT, procurement, call centre etc silos slowed down collaboration immensely. But that's no longer the case. Today's model places all service areas under a single point of accountability. That means that one person is responsible for IT, operations, managing services delivery, people, costs, and innovation. It's the end-to-end value chain made tangible and real. UniCredit's Business Solutions (a term we may hear more of in future) transformation rests on six pillars: flexibility, agility, time to market, innovation, transparency, and cost efficiency, says Cederle. He is describing, in effect, what our global events producers tell us in our regular conference call briefings. These are the trends that are impacting shared services evolution no matter what industry you're in. Most of you have got the cost side under your belt; today, you want shared services to help drive the business; no, perhaps to drive the business. When you factor the power of data analytics on top of the infrastructure muscle most of you have built up, you're looking at an incredibly valuable and influential resource. I am also reminded of the parallels across industries. Quite a few years back, Procter & Gamble's head of global business services described the exact same drivers Cederle lists, as guiding his decisions at the time. (It’s also why Filippo Passerini was named SSON’s 2008 Thought Leader for the North American region – but that’s another story.) The message is clear: customer's expectations are rising, as the digital wave has changed more or less everything we've ever known about client engagement; and at the same time technology has grown exponentially, enabling us to access enterprise data as well as external market data, and funnel it into making smarter decisions for tomorrow. As Cederle describes it: "Most consumers now expect more from banks, so we need to keep pace with their constantly evolving expectations. To do so, we must find ways to improve our interactions with each customer and speed up the time to market of innovative products and services. This, in turn, requires close collaboration among the commercial business lines, IT, operations, and other services staff." Surely there can't be many businesses out there that still think they can ignore the "big data" phenomenon, or the mobile wave that’s sweeping towards them. Read the full article here.

UniCredit Drives Globalized Services for Customer Experience

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