The project

Client : Julius Baer International Limited
Year: 2019/20 
Scope: United Kingdom
Offer: Smart Automation 
Tools: Nintex Workflow Automation

Context and issues

Julius Baer is a leading Swiss wealth management group with a global presence. Its business in the UK operates as Julius Baer International Limited with offices in London, Leeds, Manchester, Belfast and Edinburgh.

Financial services in the United Kingdom are heavily regulated so to help Julius Baer meet local requirements and to ensure full compliance, the business has numerous processes in place.

All employees are therefore subject to these processes, some of which are still manual, not optimised and managed, for example, in spreadsheets.

An example of this is the execution of transactions by employees on their personal accounts. It is a requirement that Julius Baer International tracks all transactions in order to comply with applicable regulations (such as insider trading) – these might be held in a Julius Baer account or elsewhere.

On one hand, Julius Baer International must maintain a record of employee transactions to be presented in the event of an audit. On the other hand, employees must follow a strict approval process to report and execute their transactions.

Initially, this process was manual, time-consuming and involved many people and thus multiplied the risk of errors:

1. Email from employee to manager for approval of transaction
2. Email forwarded to the Compliance Department to check a certain amount of information to validate as part of approval process.
3. Depending on the size of the transaction, a third or fourth level of approval was potentially required, involving up to the local or regional CEO.

 
For example, on the second approval level, the Compliance Department, it could easily take up to two hours to verify the information provided.
To limit the risk of errors and allow Julius Baer employees to focus on higher value-added tasks, an innovative and quick solution was needed to automate the processes while ensuring a high level of compliance.
Alongside this example, Julius Baer International wanted to be able to consider the automation of other business processes where it made sense.

 
The solution

Julius Baer International’s Risk Management department therefore called upon the services of Talan to find and implement a ‘smart automation’ solution and provide training on the chosen tool to enable the Risk Management team to use the tool autonomously.

The project began with an audit of the internal process in place that could benefit from automation.

Talan then assisted Julius Baer International in the choice of the tool, using its expertise in the field of Smart Automation (Workflow Automation, RPA, AI, etc.) to select a high-performance, competitive tool with all the functionalities required to implement a control system adapted to the situation.

The comprehensive, scalable, easy-to-use and competitive nature of the Workflow Automation platform from software publisher Nintex won Julius Baer International over.

The consulting included the definition of the use case and implementation of the POC (Proof Of Concept), the coaching of the users (to guarantee their autonomy) plus the support.

Results

Prior to this project, Julius Baer International’s processes were typically made up of a combination of spreadsheets and e-mails. These tools became gradually irrelevant to a more and more demanding compliance and audit context.

Implementing a new set of automated processes and tools will help JBI to meet their requirements for compliance and audit purposes: traceability, storage and retention of information.

Talan's digitisation and workflow automation project, based on the Workflow Automation platform of the software publisher Nintex, made it possible to :

• challenge the process in place until then,
• implement an online process,
• entirely automate certain controls,
• reduce the processing time for other checks from 2 hours to 10 minutes,
• guarantee the reliability of validation,
• guarantee the traceability of information on a long-term basis

This initial automation has been met with great success internally, particularly among the business lines, which have grasped the potential of automation to simplify their daily lives and allow them to concentrate on their high value-added tasks.

Julius Baer International therefore decided to rely on Talan for longer-term support by deploying a consultant to develop other processes. Throughout 2020, the joint Julius Baer International and Talan team will implement the digitalisation and automation of a broader set of processes.