CHALLENGE

  • Our client is a leading financial services firm with over 66 million customers worldwide operating in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Latin America.
  • After completing an acquisition of a retail bank in the UK, the internal audit function – working closely with the regulator – identified a potential breach of regulatory principles in relation to advised sales of single premium PPI with unsecured personal loans made through telephony channels.
  • Over 200,000 customers were potentially affected. Our client required a new operating procedure and processes, system enhancements, policy definition and internal stakeholder management to robustly inform, provide an understanding and ultimately provide a solution to those customers. This had to be completed within a period of 8 weeks.

ACTION

  • As our client’s internal processes, management information and resources requirements would not scale to take account of the population size in the short time frame, we mobilised a team of experienced operations, systems, process and regulatory experts to address the demands.
  • Our process experts mapped existing practices and designed an optimum straight through processing environment.
  • We mobilised in excess of 100 telephony agents, case handlers, managers and supervisors and delivered over 1,000 man-days of training to ensure the quality of output delivered required 0% rework.
  • Our regulatory experts delivered more than 14 variances to policy to take into account arrears, early arrears, life only, at harm and financial hardship customers. Each policy variance was developed in accordance with our client’s Treating Customers Fairly principles.
  • During the period of eight weeks, our team of systems specialists re-designed and partitioned the data store of the complaint processing platform so that reporting requirements would not impact other areas of the business.
  • Our team worked with external suppliers to re-design the user interface to ensure that our straight through processing model would fully integrate with the firm’s technology.
  • Communication was paramount to ensure all queries relating to the scope of the project were dealt with correctly in our operating environment. Our programme management team worked closely with over 30 internal departments to ensure policies were agreed by all parties.

RESULT

  • Within eight weeks, working in partnership with our client and an independent audit firm, we had designed a scalable operating environment, robust processes and procedures and worked with both internal and external system specialists to be in a position to contact 18,000 customers every 2 weeks and deal with both call centre and case handling requirements.
  • The project set-up was completed within the eight week period and the subsequent mailings to customers related in the seamless logging of queries and complaints, with investigation and resolution completed on a first-in, first-out basis.
  • All complaints were investigated and resolved within the timeframe set by the client.