Implementation of Lean Banking and Continuous Improvement in an African Global Bank: The United Bank for Africa

Abstract

In today’s marketplace, it’s much too risky to rely on the company gut for decision-making. Lean banking data analysis is an evidence-based solution that provides any innovative organization with a new view of organizational challenges with the objective to improve efficiency and data quality, effectively eliminating corporate waste. The process is an undergoing and rapid transformation in the banking industry. For an effective implementation of the process, the information technology must play an increasingly greater role in helping banks carry out marketing, sales, and channel integration initiatives, and in ensuring that banks comply with various regulatory requirements. To this end, IT in banking needs to adopt a strategic approach to managing change. This paper looks at what Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) offers to manage these corporate challenges and whether ITIL practices are sufficient to improve the Bank performance. The paper present ITIL best practices that are needed to manage risk but not sufficient to drive the Bank performance. According to Ndedi, Moutila and Tsoungui (2016), the real essence of lean is in harnessing the passion and knowledge of front-line staff and equipping them to focus on ensuring as many activities as possible within an end-to-end process support the delivery of value to the customer. The authors argued that the objectives of continuous improvement methods are to boost organizational performance; because simply meeting customer expectations is not anymore enough; customers who aren’t completely satisfied are likely to switch to another service provider. Building a culture of continuous improvement through the adoption of lean principles ensures the identification of the end-to-end process from the customer’s perspective and the design and management of those processes to ensure the smooth flow of information and material as efficiently as possible. The first part of this paper explains what the United Bank of Africa is. The second part discusses the principle of lean banking. The third part of the paper gives an overview of best practices with UBA.