Matching Customer Processes with Business Processes of Banks: The Example of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises as Bank Customers

Even though, financial services providers claim to offer customer-orientated services, they still focus on delivering products instead of providing solutions to their customers’ issues. Especially, small and medium-sized enterprises only get offered products which solve isolated problems, e.g. liquidity, financing, and investment services. However, these services do not reflect the intrinsic requirements of business clients such as procurement, sales and marketing, order fulfillment. Hence, customers’ perception of banking services is often far from satisfaction. Therefore, the consistent alignment of financial services to customer processes becomes increasingly important to enhance competitiveness of banks. To provide such a continuous support of customer needs this paper examines the identification of customer processes and requirements and proposes a process model which closely ties up to customer processes. This approach expands current notion of banking. The authors present their approach by using an example of small and medium-sized enterprises as clients of commercial banks.