Government agencies and industry leaders convened this month in Washington, DC, to attend the 5th annual Appian Government conference. Sessions addressed how to accelerate digital transformation, reimagine the citizen experience, and optimize case management through intelligent process automation (a.k.a., hyperautomation) using low-code software development.

The financial services industry is vast, complex, and almost infinite in its diversity. So, too, are the regulatory agencies overseeing this industry. For example, the US market's regulatory framework is incredibly complex: More than 50 state or local and more than a dozen federal agencies coexist to keep the financial services marketplace healthy, competitive, and safe for consumers. The missions of the agencies overseeing the financial services industry vary as widely as the sector itself.

Shakespeare wrote that the course of true love never did run smooth. The same could be said of diving into a process improvement project without a plan. Before jumping in head first with process mining to identify and fix a broken or inefficient process, start with a strong plan to avoid headaches for yourself and others. A written plan provides direction, while giving your stakeholders something to react to. They’ll see exactly what you want to do, and have the opportunity to make suggestions.

When a leading office supply chain coined the phrase “That was easy!” in an iconic 10-year-long ad campaign, that simple idea resonated with people everywhere. And that’s no coincidence. None of us wants our daily tasks to be labor-intensive, time-consuming, or complicated. The same is true in the world of insurance. To drive growth, insurers need to make it easy for agents and brokers.

In the past, the process improvement aspect of business process management relied on lengthy and time-consuming research. Process managers held discussions with stakeholders, made guesstimates about how or why a process underperformed, and spent days, sometimes weeks testing enhancements to see if they could observe a difference. Now, businesses have access to a data-driven process optimization tool: process mining.

What an action-packed week at Sibos, the world’s premier financial services event held last month in Amsterdam. It was exciting to be back with other industry leaders to talk about the future of banking and how intelligent automation is critical for success. Appian is modernizing processes for some of the largest banks, including many in attendance. In fact, we were excited to kick off Sibos on stage together with our client Rabobank, the second largest bank in the Netherlands.

We’d all love more efficiency in our lives. If it were possible to eliminate the time we spend waiting in lines at the grocery store, checking in at the airport, or making our way home in rush hour traffic, the world would be a happier place. Some inefficiency is inevitable. But in business, we don’t have to accept it all. There are ways to root out the causes of many inefficiencies in business processes, minimizing, if not eliminating them. The way to do this is with process mining.