Financial Services Case Study

Tax Management at UK bank

Inconsistent business processes across offices

Vastly simplified and common processes implemented across all offices

The Tax Management business within the Wealth Management Division of one of the major UK banks

Business processes were inconsistent across the two Tax offices
The workload was determined by the tax cycle resulting in imbalance of resources across the full year and substantial under-utilisation in the first quarter
High variations in individual performance levels
Tax business was profitable, with an opportunity for significant growth
Need to introduce capacity management, resource planning and performance management to support business growth

Carried out a series of introductory ‘scoping’ workshops with selected members of staff across the two Tax offices
Established project structure and improvement opportunity
Carried out a series of highly detailed process reviews and comparisons covering all Tax processes at both locations, identified key process differences and critique of weaknesses
Challenged current (individual) working practices and resultant performance levels
Carried out series of re-engineering workshops involving representatives from both locations to establish an agreed set of more effective and efficient processes
Reviewed all proposed process changes with Group Risk and Compliance departments for agreement and sign-off Implemented new processes across all locations
Addressed contractual support from tax software provider
Developed and implemented a workload and capacity planning model to enable both ‘what-if’ scenario planning, also to manage performance on a regular structured basis
Carried out benchmark comparison with other Tax return processors
Carried out a series of Performance Management workshops to establish and agree daily and weekly targets for Tax processing
Carried out skills audit across all offices and used as basis for structured training programmes

Identified significant excess capacity (over 30%) to be utilised in processing more Tax cases
Daily targets for simple cases increased from 2-3 per day to 5-6 per day
Proposed resource sharing with other Wealth departments, (Estates Management)
Vastly simplified and common processes implemented across all offices
Established a genuine performance management culture
Business now positioned to exploit the growth potential