QuadBalance

Industries · Banking and financial operations

Banking and financial operations.

Back offices at one of the UAE’s largest banks, re-engineered end to end.

The method, applied

01 Define02 Measure03 Analyse04 Improve05 Control

AI ENTERS AT STEP FOUR. READ THE FULL METHOD

If your back office is like the ones we have mapped, the reported turnaround time will not survive measurement. Files wait between desks, underwriting queues grow, and the metric counts only the clean files. We map the value stream door to door, audit the numbers themselves, rebuild the floor into work cells, and only then automate.

The record

The four-hour approval that took 5.5 days.

5.5 days 3.5 hrs

The situation

The bank measured its auto loan approvals at four hours. The truth was 5.5 days. The metric counted only clean files, and only up to the underwriter’s desk. Nearly half of all files arrived discrepant, and customers waited days while sales teams worked blind.

What changed

A value stream workshop put IT, policy, sales, operations, and strategy in one room. Verification moved from serial to parallel. Underwriting policy was simplified for straight-through processing. The floor was rebuilt into lean work cells of 12 to 15 people owning cases end to end, and shifts realigned to hourly arrival patterns.

The result

Premium approvals in 3.5 hours. Everything else in one day. Loan bookings doubled in value the following quarter, before automation began. The cleaned process was later automated on IBM BPM.

Engagement4 weeks, end to end re-engineering
Result3.5 hrs premium · 1 day standard · bookings doubled in value
DeliveredBy our founder on assignment at IBM

Credit cards, quality control moved to the front.

7 days 1 day

The situation

Card approvals took 7 days or more from data entry to customer confirmation. A quarter of files arrived discrepant. Paper moved by courier, and customer verification sat after underwriting, stalled for days waiting on employers.

What changed

Quality control moved to the front of the process, so incomplete files never entered the stream. Checks scattered across several systems were consolidated into one screen. Verification became a parallel step with an expanded waiver category agreed with the risk team.

The result

Premium cards in 1 day, all others in 3. The back-office portion fell from 3 days to 1, with far fewer discrepant files in circulation.

Engagement4 weeks, end to end re-engineering
Result1 day premium · 3 days standard
DeliveredBy our founder on assignment at IBM

Islamic home finance, diagnostic.

29 days 8 days

The diagnostic

A 29 day average approval time, with 65 percent of applications taking 10 to 30 days and heavy rework at intake. The two week diagnostic measured inventory and wait at each stage and charted a redesign with the potential to reach 8 days: simplified documentation, a dedicated processing team, and one round of data entry instead of two.

Engagement2 weeks, diagnostic
DeliveredBy our founder on assignment at IBM
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