Old National Bancorp
Improving the Deposit Acquisition Process
All retail banks strive to enhance the customer experience while reducing
time and cost. This project demonstrates how major divisions within a
bank can work together to accomplish change quickly while streamlining
the processes that pave the way for the introduction of new technology.
With assets approaching $9 billion, Old National Bancorp is the largest
bank holding company headquartered in Indiana. They own multiple banking
centers in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee. Old National
boasts a 165-year history of solid performance as a result of the company’s
unfailing commitment to meeting the diverse needs of its customers, employees
and shareholders.
Background
Old National wanted to stabilize and obtain expense control from their
"One Bank Consolidation," an initiative to bring about standardization
in recently acquired and merged banking offices. Their current account
opening process was slow, redundant, generated too many errors and created
confusion.
Old National’s major focus was to improve the customer account opening
experience while reducing the time and cost associated with gathering
deposits. They engaged Nolan to work with them to redesign the new business
deposit process from point of sale through all aspects of deposit operations.
Deposit Acquisition Redesign
To begin, the existing deposit account process was divided into five
components: sales, verification, account opening, account closing (completed
sale) and paperwork. In addition, back-room processes were evaluated to
complete the account opening cycle from branch-opening tasks to the first
statement cycle.
Next, a team was formed, comprised of representatives from each banking
region plus the regional deposit committee. All team members were required
to have had direct customer contact, as their role was to develop recommendations
from the customer’s point of view. Additionally, representatives from
the Continuous Improvement department assisted in team facilitation and
data gathering. Subject matter experts throughout the bank were active
in developing recommendations that affected their specific areas.
One challenge the team faced was the requirement to continue to use the
current version of our application software. Additionally, the team understood
that no out-of-pocket money would be spent to improve their information
systems.
Throughout the project, a strong emphasis was placed on quality. This
meant that in an environment where several banks were recently consolidated,
many tasks had to be standardized, as well as be pushed forward in the
processing stream. The first person in the process would be accountable
for doing each activity right, the first time. Not surprisingly, the team
discovered many Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s) were performing
unnecessary tasks without adding value to the customer or the bank.
Results
The redesign team successfully developed over 35 recommendations. One
major improvement was moving the account maintenance functionality to
the field where the CSR’s can perform customer updates directly to the
system. With this change, the CSR’s no longer needed to complete forms
and calm down customers who were complaining that their requested maintenance
was not getting done.
Time evaluations, done by the project team before and after, identified
a time savings and a CSR capacity improvement of over 50 percent. This
translates into an improved capacity equivalent of 69 FTE or more than
$2.3 million in cost avoidance. Furthermore, the bank will significantly
enhance the customer’s experience through improved account set-up time
and customer service. 
