validus management consultancy UK

Financial Services Case Study

Tax Management at UK bank


Inconsistent business processes across offices
Vastly simplified and common processes implemented across all offices

THE ORGANISATION

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

THE ISSUES / PROBLEMS

  • 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

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

  • 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

PROJECT RESULTS

  • 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