Interview with Eduardo Lazaro Hermosilla

ABOUT THE INTERVIEW

Prior to the Global Back Office Improvement & Operational Excellence in Banking Summit, we’ve held an exclusive Interview with Eduardo Lazaro Hermosilla from BBVA Group.

Eduardo is the Global Head of Operations Discipline for BBVA Group.

You will be presenting on “Scaling automation in Operations Back Offices,” what are some key takeaways the attendees can expect from your session?

For some years now, if we ask the Management Committee of any Bank about the importance and priority of automating operational processes, the answer is always: “absolutely necessary and a priority”. However, and despite the progress already made, the degree of manual processing level remains high. Why? Is there a manner to approach this challenge in a different way? The new native-digital players are born “automated by default”, while traditional banks operate a stock of processes with a high level of manual labor. How to face this challenge?

What would be the most important challenge going through Scaling automation in Operations Back Office in 2021?

Although most operational processes are local, it is possible to identify cross-geography and cross-process tasks and activities. The challenge would be: can we take advantage of it to scale automation, without the need to build solutions from scratch for each process / geography, and thus accelerate and improve the automation business case? Do we have the needed resources (technological, organizational and human) for this?

What are the top 3 changes you expect to see in the Back Office Operations in the near future?

• Scale automation to be able to evolve the Catalogs of provided-services, incorporating new services with greater added value: services with direct interaction with customers -Operations Offices performing as Front Offices-, services and processes of corporate functions (Finance, Compliance, …)

• Evolution of service level agreements: SLAs 2.0 (customization of price and SLA per customer)

• Back Offices adaptation to mixed remote/face-to-face work models (or pure remote), adapting ways of working and leveraging advanced analytical models to optimize their management (demand forecast & productivity-measurement advanced models, control models adjustments to new ways of working…)