Financial services company tackles operational challenges with a process assessment

Client background

This company is a 100+ year-old leading provider of insurance, diversified real estate, agriculture and private equity solutions with more than $750M in global annual revenue and is a member of a multinational holding company.

The business challenge

This company had seen significant turnover and operating challenges due to poor data quality, manual processes and conflicting priorities and needed to assess their mortgage commissions accounting processes to identify operational and technical bottlenecks and inefficiencies. These challenges created manual efforts, disparate tools and inefficient data management processes. There was a need to both review historical transactions and process improvement opportunities for future transactions within the loan commission process.

Baker Tilly was engaged to uncover pain points related to their technology, processes and resource dependencies.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly was tasked with documenting where pain points existed, recommending potential opportunities for improvement and to be ultimately responsible for defining the proper strategy and sequencing of upcoming operating model reorganization and technology initiatives to maximize business value. Emphasis was placed on achieving immediate wins for the business while building towards long-term improvement by identifying opportunities for automation in ongoing technology initiatives.

Baker Tilly collaborated with stakeholders across the client organization through several process and business value prioritization workshops to:

• Collaborate with team members to understand core operations and business activities
• Identify the pain points/shortcomings in the current-state processes and brainstorm potential resolutions
• Ideate and evaluate future-state technical capabilities and required resources to deliver on the target strategy
• Outline specific project initiatives based on key findings to maximize business impact with an emphasis on return on investment
• Develop long-term strategy for implementing business transformation across multiple initiatives

Baker Tilly’s process assessment produced a sequenced road map for the client focused on providing immediate value where attainable and laying the groundwork for larger future endeavors. The initiatives identified improve day-to-day operations, while also building toward more efficient, resourceful and technically leveraged procedures. These efforts will achieve the company leadership goal to secure automation capabilities to improve process efficiency and data availability while minimizing the difficulty of organizational transformation.