Insights from The Lab

A Lean Banking Case Study in Mortgage Operations Transformation

If you’re seeking to achieve lean management and operations in banking, some of the biggest opportunities can be hiding in plain sight. That’s what happened in this real-world case study.

The bank in question dominates the southern U.S. The areas of concern were their mortgage servicing and default management. While this bank services more than 2 million mortgages across 48 states, they sought to employ lean principles to rapidly improve operations and manage growth, especially in the southeast—their largest market. Enter The Lab.

The CFO: Industrial Engineer of Knowledge Work

“Our business is unique, so our knowledge work can’t be standardized.”

This belief is almost universally accepted—but almost universally untrue. I call it the “anti-standardization bias.” It reinforces the status quo and hides the business improvement opportunity of our time: the standardization of knowledge work.

Cost Cutting Strategies in Banks in Just Five Steps

This is the story of a major bank. You know their name, although we won’t mention it here. And this story concerns their Caribbean operations.

Scattered across all this geography was a retail branch network that the bank’s leadership knew could be better. They asked The Lab, “What are retail banks doing to control costs and improve efficiency?”

Four Infamous Falsehoods About Operational Excellence in Financial Services

In this article, we’ll examine four persistent misperceptions—we call them “infamous falsehoods”—about operational excellence in financial services. They often contribute to bank-wide problems in the first place, such as needless downtime, duplicative work, and unnecessary over-service. Knowing about them can help you avoid them—or uncover them, if they’re already lurking within your bank.