That’s what NatWest Bank, a leading retail and commercial bank in the UK, set out to do with the help of Camunda. Joanne Barry, Head of Technology Fraud Prevention COE at NatWest, led off her recent CamundaCon presentation by quoting the CEO of NatWest, Paul Thwaite, whose stated goal is to “build a simpler, more integrated and technology-driven bank that is capable of even greater impact.” One of the most powerful ways to do that in 2025 is by operationalizing AI.

A complex environment

Milesh Chudasama, Digital Transformation Director at NatWest, then took the stage to set the scene. The Fraud Center of Excellence group at NatWest includes over 800 fraud center agents using an average of 14 applications per call, with over 60 tools available to them across a range of platforms.

As you can imagine, this is a complex setup and it takes a long time to train people well to provide a good customer experience and to be in full compliance with regulations. And when they leave, all that painstaking training goes with them.

The lack of standardization

Inconsistency from a lack of standardization is a big problem. This not only means that customers are not served in the same way every call, but it also means that processes are often recreated across multiple platforms, duplicating effort.

Milesh explained that a lack of orchestration is holding them back, and that “what we want to do is create a good solid process orchestration engine.” This will enable a headless architecture that they can replicate across as many platforms as they need to, saving enormous amounts of time and effort.

Unlocking the value of AI for fraud detection

NatWest is looking for AI to drive specific business outcomes. Joanne explained, “We know AI will transform our ability to deliver” these key results:

1. Increase customer engagement
2. Maximize agility
3. Drive operating leverage

To drive those outcomes, they have outlined a series of initiatives where AI can produce valuable results. As Milesh put it, the goal is to “use AI in the right way, and not let it run free… and do some stuff that can damage your reputation.”

Analyzing and digesting large amounts of data, along with writing and testing code, were powerful ways that the team is able to use AI to speed up their work and reduce their time to market. AI can also build on existing rules-based systems for something like anomaly detection, helping them detect patterns quickly and be more proactive, rather than reactive.

One exciting initiative included using AI within Camunda to move “the creation of initial BPMN diagrams to the left, so that the business generates it themselves,” which will result in much tighter business-IT alignment and accelerate the way they build processes to begin with. AI will also help the team reduce the number of applications they need to touch to solve a problem, improving the way a process is “governed and managed by a human and an AI agent” or by straight-through processing.

Disrupt and transform

AI clearly has the power to both disrupt and transform banking and financial services. The team at NatWest has identified a number of opportunities.

• Customer experience: AI can respond faster and automate more cases, improving customer satisfaction.
• Engineering productivity: AI tools can help teams write code or design BPMN diagrams much more rapidly than before, speeding up production and making collaboration easier.
• Process simplification: Features like Optimize give them data points so they can understand what works and what doesn’t, and where AI can be most effective.
• Fraud/Financial crime: Understanding patterns and which things to react to and which not to, which is critical with the reports of fraud growing daily.

One key Milesh highlighted was the ability to determine “how far you want the AI to service a customer before you break out from the AI” and hand off to a human. This is a critical step in ensuring a good customer experience and avoiding the problems of AI attempting to navigate an issue that is too complex for it.

What’s next?

Milesh noted that what he really wants his team to do is make sure the customer gets the same journey no matter how they interact with the company. “Not omnichannel,” he observed, “let’s call it optichannel—the right customer to the right journey to get the right output.” Using tools like Optimize to simplify and automate processes, and orchestrating end-to-end with Camunda to better understand processes and remove human touchpoints where it’s most effective, will help them get there faster.

See the full presentation and more from CamundaCon Amsterdam 2025

You can check out the full presentation from NatWest here or watch it below, and for more be sure to check out all the recordings from CamundaCon Amsterdam 2025.

If you liked this and wish you’d seen it live, don’t miss your chance to join us at the next CamundaCon! Register now for CamundaCon New York 2025.

The post Reinventing Fraud Detection: NatWest’s Journey to Operationalize AI with Camunda appeared first on Camunda.

Using software to help close the automation gap for small and medium enterprises

Switzerland consists of 26 cantons (federal states), each with its own set of tax regulations. At the 2024 CamundaCon in New York, Marcin and Jerzy explained how they used Camunda to build a “digital accountant” called Luca that helps small and medium enterprises automate and optimize processing for paper accounting forms.

Building a solution to automate multiple clients’ accounting rules

The team had to solve several challenges to develop a solution that would be useful for different organizations and industries. The solution needed to understand tax regulations for each canton and support the multiple official languages of each—a varying combination of German, Italian, French, and English.

It also needed to understand basic accounting principles and learn how to apply those principles in the right context for specific organizations and document types. Plus, it needed the ability to detect accounting items from scanned documents and classify tax-related items correctly for the Swiss system; creating structured data from unstructured content. Transparency was also essential. The business processes and decision models needed to be auditable for regulators.

Because the solution would be hosted in a multitenant environment, the team also needed to ensure secure communication for tenants and subtenants, as well as with Bexio (business software for small businesses and startups) and other accounting systems. And like any good software solution, it needed to be agile and flexible enough to change as tax laws change.

Creating a collective decision model

The development team wanted to create a model to orchestrate manual and automated tasks and use decision tables to store the tribal knowledge of human accountants. Based on BeOne’s demonstrated experience supporting hundreds of thousands of business users with Camunda-built business processes, they were confident they could use Camunda’s BPMN and DMN capabilities to create an agile, dynamic, multitenant solution.

First, they collected and analyzed manual accounting decisions for tasks requiring human assistance. Next, they developed a model to predict behavior and provide automated services based on those predictions. The model also assists with manual decision-making. Finally, they created a feedback loop synchronizing manual and automated tasks, creating a self-sustaining decision model.

The decision model uses decision tables with rules for product determination, product groups, accounting groups, and tax rates. Each table is powered by a combination of rules from the feedback loop and sources like machine learning.

The result is a solution that applies business processes and subprocesses to orchestrate and automate invoice classification and posting from end to end. It can scan and classify documents, recognize invoice items within a document, verify the supplier and payment, detect accounting items and tax rates, make an accounting entry, and post to the accounting system.

If the document and the booking are clear, the solution can post without waiting for confirmation from an accountant. If any information is unclear or requires confirmation, it asks for manual input or verification and stores that knowledge. As feedback increases, the level of automation increases.

Example of the solution’s end-to-end process flow

As the solution is deployed in a multitenant architecture, the team manages the complexity of data security and rule-sharing among multiple clients by establishing tenants for accounting offices and subtenants for their customers. Information from each tenant is shared to a central decision model, then that decision model is used to automate the tenant’s processes.

With this structure, the solution can remember and apply rules and decisions specific to each client and their documents.

Improving automation and efficiency while reducing risk

“Our model is not just win-win but win-win-win.” – Marcin Makowski, CEO, BeOne

Luca’s development team succeeded in building a solution that uses collective human knowledge to accurately execute complex accounting decisions. Its robust decision model provides an auditable knowledge base that applies decisions learned through client use to continually improve the classification of documents and expenses.

The team and their clients are realizing benefits from this model, including:

• Quality, stable processes for items posting in compliance with complex regulations
• Efficiency from the quality of process data and reduction of mistakes
• Risk mitigation through the introduction of control rules
• Transparency from auditable rules and records
• Processing speed delivered through well-performing decision tables, even in tables with up to 1 million rules
• New services developed as a result of well-functioning decision tables

Unique to the business model, clients only pay a fee if Luca delivers an expected outcome—typically, time savings calculated by the automation rate of the process instance. This approach gives small and medium enterprises in Switzerland access to an automated accounting service at an affordable price.

Overall, as Marcin explained, “Thanks to the collected human decisions, we improve the level of automation and reduce decision fatigue for employees, giving them more time and energy to work on more important tasks.”

Refining the model through human training

Marcin and Jerzy showed how a collective decision model can be a versatile, cost-effective way to automate complex processes for multiple users with different requirements. They also demonstrated how taking a dynamic and iterative approach to developing decision-making capabilities allows an organization to go to market with a set of general rules and then expand and refine those rules through user input.

In Luca’s case, once accountants began using the solution, it was able to collect their input via the feedback loop and improve decision-making and automation.

This approach has an advantage over using knowledge gleaned from generative AI because it is true instead of theoretical. In other words, Luca generates correct decisions because it is trained on manual decisions from human accountants. The differentiator in their solution—the human decision—is at the heart of their process.

Inspiring developers to look for new process automation opportunities

This CamundaCon presentation provided an interesting example of how to use a collective decision model to create new automation opportunities for small and medium enterprises. As Jerzy and Marcin pointed out, the amount of unstructured data within organizations continues to increase and, along with it, opportunities to find new automations through interpreting and adding structure to unstructured data.

To see more details on this project, watch the full session replay. Then, check out other CamundaCon presentations for inspiration on new ways to use process orchestration and automation to solve your most complex problems.

Join us in Amsterdam

The next CamundaCon is almost here! It’s not too late to join us on May 14–15 in Amsterdam. Or get ahead of the game and register for CamundaCon 2025 in NYC this October.

The post Building a Collective Decision Model for Complex Automations appeared first on Camunda.

For example, of the 800 senior IT decision-makers surveyed for our annual State of Process Orchestration & Automation report:

• 82% say miscommunication between teams leads to the wrong thing being built and/or rolled out to customers—up from 68% in 2024.
• 77% say the time it takes to design and agree upon process changes is a bottleneck at their organization—up from 73% in 2024.
• 62% say business users and IT cannot easily collaborate on individual processes and/or projects—up from 58% in 2024 who pointed to a disconnect between IT decision-makers and business leaders around their processes.

Poor cross-functional collaboration can threaten project success. It can also result in the wrong solutions being built, costly rework, and a frustrating experience for delivery teams and their customers.

What can leaders do to help disparate teams and stakeholders work more collaboratively and align more successfully on their process automation initiatives?

Camunda’s Helen Park, senior GSI partner director, posed that question to a panel of process automation and digital transformation experts at the 2024 CamundaCon in New York. Let’s go over their key takeaways.

Actionable advice for improving cross-functional collaboration

Set a collaborative tone right from the top.

1. Establish a shared vision and goals

Focus on the common goal, and ensure all stakeholders align on the same vision and outcomes. Clearly explain the purpose and goals of the project, how automation benefits the organization as a whole, and how those benefits tie back to the teams’ and organization’s charters.

“… human interactions, human communications, and planning for everybody to see the same vision and the goal to achieve the outcome—in most of these large process automation initiatives, that becomes the key success factor in terms of deciding the fate of the outcome.” –Prashant Gaonkar, V.P., Global Strategy and Planning, Enterprise Platforms, Cognizant

2. Foster vertical and horizontal alignment

Drive vertical alignment by clearly communicating the vision from the C-suite. Improve horizontal alignment and ensure collaboration across business, IT, and operational teams by selecting the right projects and technologies, communicating requirements for each team, and tracking and sharing the value delivered to project stakeholder teams.

“View alignment and collaboration across two axes. One is a vertical axis where you have to have a C-level vision that actually drives the effort and is clearly articulated and disseminated throughout the entire organization because otherwise, you will not drive alignment down to the user level… The second axis we see is horizontal alignment across business, which drives how you select projects for automation in the first place, how you select technology, communicate requirements between business and IT, and ultimately how you communicate or track the value delivered by these initiatives back to the business.” –Frederic Meier, S.V.P., Sales, Camunda

3. Promote transparency and trust

Be open about automation goals, potential impacts, outcomes, and business value. Address potential concerns, such as planned job displacements, reorganizations, or new operational processes with clear messaging on the organizational benefits.

“You’ve got to offer up trust before anybody offers it back to you.” -Mike Hastie, Major Healthcare Insurer

4. Break down silos with a “win together” mindset

Encourage a culture where all teams work toward collective success, ensuring that departmental priorities do not hinder collaboration.

“Silos are there when there’s a fear of missing out, a fear of losing power or control or the organizational design in terms of boundaries and barriers. That’s when you create silos. But if you align everybody with a single goal/outcome—‘everybody wins or nobody wins’—the message becomes very easy. The silos break down, then they work together.” –Prashant Gaonkar

“You need a product that allows you to create alignment between business and IT. Our approach to process orchestration and automation is, of course, one where it’s the literal representation of what business wants when you talk about the BPMN process. It is also a visualization of what is actually being automated, and that allows you to give the business visibility back into an automated project. Now you can track results, you can visualize results, and you can speak the language of the business better.” –Frederic Meier

Manage proactively and inclusively

5. Take a “four-legged-table” approach

Think of product, tech, design, and business partners as four legs of a table. All four need to be even for the table to be functional.

“If you have one leg or a couple legs that are not in sync, then you’re not going to have a successful product development. So I think leadership setting the right tone, right culture from the top is key.” –Bhargav Trivedi, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Capital One

6. Cultivate “extreme ownership”

Encourage leaders and team members to take full responsibility for project success by proactively taking any steps necessary to make sure the project is done correctly.

“We all need to demonstrate that for a successful implementation… to say ‘I own this. I need to make this successful.’” –Bhargav Trivedi

7. Engage with empathy

Understand that the teams and stakeholders on your project have other priorities as well. Taking time to acknowledge their concerns and their perspective helps drive buy-in and reduce resistance.

“Different groups all have other priorities. You have to have empathy towards their priorities. You have to understand them.” –Prashant Gaonkar

“Put yourself in the shoes of your customer or your stakeholders who are going to be impacted by the project. Make sure that you think from their perspective… Make them feel that they are included in the process.” –Bhargav Trivedi

Structure your communications

8. Construct a collaboration framework

Define clear communication structures, decision-making roles, and engagement forums to keep teams aligned; for example, daily scrums, status reports, value-tracking meetings.

“When you start a big project where multiple stakeholders are involved, you have to set up a structure of how you’re going to communicate; the forums that you want to bring in; who is the decision maker for each of those forums; who is responsible; what kind of content are you going to talk about in each forum; and maximize efficiency across the board… What’s necessary for you will be determined by the nature of the work you are doing, the state of the product development you are in, then go from there. Having more forums in the beginning would not hurt, and you can pare it back once you have established trust and norms across the whole program and stakeholders.” –Bhargav Trivedi

9. Leverage metrics for fact-based discussions

Use KPIs and value-tracking frameworks to communicate impact, measure success, and create alignment around data-driven outcomes. Articulate the business value and impact on business teams with KPIs.

“If you’ve got metrics, you can start making the conversation fact-based. That always helps drive out a better conversation. When it’s very clear what you need to fix, that makes it easier for people to establish a goal and drive towards an outcome.” -Mike Hastie

“Focus on the business value and the KPIs you have been able to achieve. Articulate the actual impact to business teams and their KPIs by doing a value workshop and working with partners to articulate that. Once you do that, the business is going to understand the real impact the solution will have.” –Frederic Meir

Take advantage of new, AI-based tools

10. Adopt future-proof mindsets and technologies

Embrace AI, real-time intelligence, and process orchestration tools to enhance collaboration and efficiency while staying ahead of emerging tech trends.

“Everything is going to end up with AI in it. Let me give you a heads-up: If we don’t give our customer what they want, if we don’t deliver the value they want, if we don’t get the value they want, they will find their own technology to deliver it for them. We need to embrace new technologies, find the potential in them, leverage the potential, and not fall into the hype cycle. There is a huge opportunity for us to use tech to be the best versions of ourselves.” –Mike Hastie

Learn how Camunda helps business and IT teams collaborate better

Camunda is designed to help organizations collaboratively build better, more efficient automations and get to market faster. The platform uses open standards like business process model and notation (BPMN) and decision model and notation (DMN) to align teams with a common model and language. It also gets low-code and pro-code teams to unite on a clear, shared vision and outcome.

See how Camunda’s platform can help you accelerate transformation, and join us at the next CamundaCon to meet and learn from leading organizations that are achieving amazing transformations with process orchestration.

The post 10 Strategies to Improve Cross-Functional Collaboration on Process Orchestration and Automation Projects appeared first on Camunda.

• Enhancing process visibility

• Reducing regular administrative tasks

• Modernizing all the stages and processes of interaction with a client or customer, from the initial contact to the conclusion of services

Tom Clark, assurance digital integration leader at RSM, and Ken Koch, forensic market leader at RSM/BDO, joined us at CamundaCon NYC 2024 to speak about their transformation journey. Together, they delved into how RSM embraced Camunda to improve process visibility, composability, and audit process efficiency. In their presentation, Tom and Ken discussed how RSM revamped its engagement lifecycle using Camunda, incorporating legacy solutions and creating an engagement ecosystem for improved efficiency—from client acceptance to closure.

Resolving inefficacies within siloed infrastructures

RSM, renowned for its industry-leading services, faced a daunting challenge: its legacy process management ecosystem consisted of 26 different applications that were not effectively communicating with each other.

This fragmentation led to potential inefficiencies, such as manual data transfers and a lack of visibility into the status of thousands of active customer journeys. Auditors and staff were bogged down with administrative tasks, detracting from client-focused work. Overall, the outdated engagement lifecycle threatened productivity and scalability.

Tom Clark recognized the need for change. “The existing system was complex and cumbersome, hindering our ability to deliver the level of service we aimed for,” he explained.

Ken Koch added, “Our teams were spending significant time on tasks that could be automated, which was not the best use of their expertise.”

Streamlining end-to-end processes with Camunda

RSM’s strategic initiative was to overhaul its audit process, boost productivity, and elevate client services. The firm turned to Camunda to replace the technology-driven process with an orchestrated, process-driven approach that leverages technology for optimal customer engagement and performance.

Camunda empowers organizations to fully leverage their existing resources while facilitating strategic transformations that elevate customer and employee experiences. Camunda’s intelligent process orchestration and automation platform helps organizations:

• Overcome the limitations of legacy systems
• Drive digital transformation
• Achieve long-term success by enhancing agility, efficiency, IT/business collaboration, and scalability.

In their presentation, “RSM – Legacy to Process Orchestration Journey,” Clark and Koch discuss how implementing Camunda at RSM achieved benefits like enhanced visibility, reduced admin tasks, modernized engagement, and increased efficiency.

Enhanced visibility into engagements

Camunda Optimize provided real-time insights into active engagements, enabling centralized monitoring and management without the need for manual check-ins. This transparency allowed anyone within the organization to quickly understand the current status of any engagements.

“What we’ve done with Camunda means anyone concerned can push a button and see the current status of everything. This means they don’t have to go out to that customer team and say, Hey, what’s going on with this engagement? Where are you in these steps? Do you have issues? That’s better for us and better for our customers.” – Ken Koch, Forensic Market Leader, RSM/BDO 

Reduced administrative tasks

Automating repetitive tasks significantly reduced time spent on administrative activities, freeing RSM to focus on adding value to client interactions.

In the first four months alone, RSM saved an estimated 720,000 hours during customer engagement, translating into substantial cost savings.

“We can take all this monolithic code, 26 applications, and wrap it into a single orchestrated end-to-end engagement life cycle. In our first four months, we had 9,000 customer engagements running through Camunda, and we’re looking at 80 hours per engagement of savings.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Modernized engagement lifecycle

RSM restructured its engagement lifecycle with Camunda, creating a future-ready engagement ecosystem that streamlined the entire process from client acceptance to engagement closure. Data normalization, modularity, and enhanced visibility facilitated this transformation.

“If we want to use agile technology and keep pace with business demand, we need people to be agile and processes to be agile. By creating a complete vision that talks about how this impacts people, technology, and processes and how it impacts the bottom line, through that analysis, I was able to show our leadership team that with the same headcount, we can process 20% more clients. And for us, that’s huge.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Increased capacity, savings, and training efficiency

The adoption of Camunda had a notable impact on RSM’s operations. Automating repetitive tasks and integrating applications into a single system led to considerable time savings, translating into cost savings.

As mentioned earlier, in just the first four months after implementing Camunda, RSM saved an estimated 720,000 hours across customer engagements. Training requirements for new hires were also reduced as processes became more streamlined and less complex.

“A lot of it’s about efficiencies and time savings. Previously, developers had to learn 26 tools, and they had to know in their heads about this one, then over here that one, but now if it’s orchestrated for them, and because of this training becomes far easier in the future.” – Tom Clark, Assurance Digital Integration Leader, RSM

Savings continue to accrue as RSM embeds further efficiencies into its processes. RSM expects process orchestration integration to extend beyond customer engagement, influencing auditors’ work and supporting services like consultations and resource assignments.

The project’s success has fostered a greater willingness within the wider organization to consider further process orchestration and automation solutions across other areas of business functionality.

Continuous improvement and agility

Implementing Camunda has been a significant step in modernizing RSM’s audit process, enhancing cross-company process visibility, greatly reducing manual and administrative tasks, and significantly simplifying the engagement lifecycle. The firm has laid a strong foundation for continuous improvement and agility, enabling it to:

• Adapt to future changes in technology (such as leveraging artificial intelligence integration) and business practices (such as changes in legislation or adopting regional banking standards)
• Roll out tested composable processes and orchestration to the broader global organization
• Better serve its customers

If you would like to know more about RSM’s transformative journey to create a future-proof customer engagement ecosystem, you can watch their CamundaCon presentation right here.

The post RSM Creates a Future-Proof Engagement Ecosystem with Camunda’s AI Orchestration appeared first on Camunda.

“We want our customers to be able to get their terminals online 24/7 with as little fuss as possible. We need the power to accommodate a significant market shift towards automation and self-service, enhancing our scalability and agility, and to handle future growth and inevitable increase in volume.”
—André Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

In the fast-paced world of near-field communication (NFC) and cashless transactions, Payter is setting the bar high. The company has been laser-focused on perfecting its customer and payment terminal onboarding processes to keep up with an ever-growing demand for automation and self-service capabilities. Recognizing the need for seamless integration of digital and physical workflows, Payter turned to Camunda and our gold partner, Incentro, to create a robust back-end for its 24/7 global service platform.

“We’re looking at new territories, and scalability, adaptability, and composability are key. For each territory, there are specific banking certifications and standards, and we need to slot those in with minimum fuss. That’s the real power of Camunda: flexibility without needing a high-code solution where you have to build that into your code.”
—André Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

Since becoming a Camunda partner in 2019, the cutting-edge digital services company Incentro has offered its international clients advanced solutions for organizing and automating business processes. This includes everything from creating processes to implementing them and continually improving them. With over twenty years of experience, Incentro is collaborating with Camunda to transform how companies work and interact with their customers.

Riding the wave of hypergrowth

The “BOAT” metaphor is introduced in the presentation to symbolize the advanced orchestration system Payter requires for its complex supply chain operations and readiness for the coming demand and customer expectations. Weegink explains that “BOAT” represents a process orchestration layer essential for automating Payter’s enterprise processes and how Camunda satisfies the requirements of Gartner’s benchmarks. Embracing the concept, Bal agrees that this orchestrated system they are developing with Camunda 8 is crucial for navigating Payter’s projected market growth and ensuring the company’s readiness for future challenges.

“In existing processes, everything touches everything else and works toward the same goal, so composability and the ability to reuse those processes allows us to expand and transition into more territories and areas of the business far more easily.”
—Floris Weegink, Field CTO, Incentro

Payter stands at the cutting edge of NFC and cashless technology, leading the charge in a market that is swiftly pivoting towards self-service and automation. The goal is clear: to scale up efficiently while managing an inevitable surge in volume and demand. In short, for Payter, riding the BOAT wave is a guideline for creating future-ready infrastructure and solutions.

Plain sailing with orchestration and automation

Through the implementation of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation platform, Payter has connected its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and terminal management systems with a customer-facing portal. This integration allows for a smooth, automated end-to-end process for configuring, deploying, and managing payment terminals.

Payter has harnessed the power of Camunda 8 to orchestrate and automate a multitude of operations, planning to leverage the latest in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), business process management (BPM), and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). Low-code applications and RPA bots have been and will be instrumental in this transformation, enabling rapid application development and the automation of repetitive tasks.

According to Andre Bal, the results speak for themselves.

“We’ve gone down from a week to onboard a payment terminal to 10 minutes; I’ve even seen as little as 10 seconds!”
—Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

This drastic reduction in onboarding time from up to five business days to minutes is a testament to the power of Camunda’s process orchestration capabilities. It has granted Payter the agility and composability needed for future growth, ensuring a friction-free user experience and effectively managing growth without the overhead of disproportionately increasing staff numbers.

The future with Camunda

With rapid growth on the horizon, Payter is confidently preparing for its next evolutionary phase. The scalable tech stack means that Payter is ready to handle increased demands, ensuring processes can adapt and support global operations around the clock. Camunda brings modern capabilities to the table, such as end-to-end process orchestration and AI integration, in a cloud-native architecture that is both scalable and resilient.

Payter’s journey with Camunda and RPA has streamlined its onboarding process and positioned the company as a nimble, forward-thinking leader in the cashless technology space. Many leading technology companies are now using Camunda to streamline service-driven processes and focus on innovation, looking to a future where the requirements behind BOAT will be essential to staying competitive and offering a level of service that customers will expect as standard.

“We’re a tech company, and we want to leverage technology to its full potential. Now, if that road leads us to machine learning, and that’s definitely something we’re interested in. We’re ready.”
—Andre Bal, Director of Supply Chain and Automation, Payter

This strategic partnership has enabled Payter to deliver an improved customer experience, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and subsequent retention rates. As Payter continues to grow, its orchestrated approach between people, systems, and devices will remain pivotal to delivering efficient and innovative solutions to the market. With Camunda, Payter is future-ready, whatever that future may hold.

The post Payter Considers the Future of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies appeared first on Camunda.

In his presentation, he discussed how embracing a modern process orchestration and automation tool like Camunda can lead to remarkable organizational change and set the stage for future growth. Shashidar (Shashi) shares their transformative journey from an outdated BPM tool to a Camunda-centered architecture, enhancing its claims processes and customer interactions with increased efficiency, visibility, compliance, and customization, all while delivering the exceptional customer service that customers now expect as standard.

CamundaCon allows fellow industry professionals and thought leaders to exchange practical insights and tactics, discover helpful hints and techniques, and participate in workshops, lectures, and process orchestration and automation events throughout the conference. If you’d like to know more, regardless of your familiarity with the Camunda community or process orchestration and automation, please check out our upcoming local and national events.

The challenge of outdated systems

The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, boasting a rich history of 200 years, recognized that its old workflow system, established in 2004, was no longer adequate. The company’s legacy platform, responsible for approximately 650 essential workflows, was suddenly left without support when another provider acquired it. As a result, the outdated and unsupported system posed a security threat and hindered the efficiency of the customer experience due to its lack of a viable upgrade option.

Its tightly coupled architecture was now preventing the flexibility needed for the company’s future growth in the competitive, customer-centric, and agile insurance arena.

Legacy and outdated systems can be negative for process automation and orchestration best practices because they can lead to a number of challenges, including but not limited to:

• Decreased productivity: System downtime can lead to lost customers and decreased team member efficiency.
• Expensive maintenance: Outdated systems are more likely to fail, which can make them expensive to fix and maintain, and it is difficult to recruit staff with the knowledge to maintain custom or dated solutions.
• Frequent outages: Outdated software is less likely to be reliable and may break more often.
• Incompatibility: When older systems are combined with newer ones, issues such as data inconsistencies, system incompatibilities, and workflow disruptions can arise, leading to inefficiencies and potential downtime. Outdated data can cause disruptions and delays in process.
• Compliance: Compliance requirements often require the use of up-to-date and secure software.
• Lack of support: As communities move to newer technologies, support for older ones decreases, increasing the risk of security failure and without a clear upgrade route.
• Stuck in the past: Future-proofing process orchestration is crucial to ensure an organization’s workflows remain agile, scalable, and adaptable to evolving technological advancements and market demands, thereby maintaining operational efficiency and competitive edge over time.

According to Shashi, the need for modernization was clear and critical, and the company required a robust, API-driven, and decoupled orchestration and automation solution to modernize its claims operations, underwriting, and customer support and through which to incorporate helpful emerging technologies like AI.

The Camunda solution

After thorough consideration and proof-of-concept trials, Camunda stood out as the solution of choice due to its maturity, scalability, and flexibility. Adopting a microservices architecture, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance could ensure seamless interactions and prepare for future technological shifts.

“We built customized components and deployed them quickly. The benefits we are witnessing from these are substantial. The Operate analytics are astounding, providing daily insights that have led to strategic and tactical decisions.”
– Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Camunda offers decoupled orchestration through its remote workflow engine, which can be provisioned and configured separately from the application and process solution. This decoupling allows for a number of benefits, including:

• Independent scaling: The workflow engine can be scaled without affecting the application code.
• Easier troubleshooting: Issues can be easily identified in one component, and vulnerabilities are not spread to other components. 
• Software as a service: The workflow engine can be operated as a service, either in a public cloud or as an in-house service. 
• Local application development: Applications can connect remotely to the workflow engine, allowing for local or on-premise development.

Camunda is a process orchestration and automation platform that helps organizations design, automate, and improve processes and business rules. It plays a significant role in decoupling applications and processes in the following ways:

• Process engine abstraction: Camunda provides a process engine that acts as a layer of abstraction between business processes and the applications that perform the tasks within those processes. By defining processes in BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) and decisions in DMN (Decision Model and Notation), Camunda allows you to change and manage processes without modifying the underlying applications.
• Microservices orchestration: Camunda can orchestrate microservices by sending signals to start or complete tasks. This allows individual microservices to remain loosely coupled and focused on their specific functionality while the Camunda engine manages the state and order of process execution.
• External task pattern: Camunda supports the External Task pattern, where services outside the process engine handle long-running or resource-intensive tasks. These external tasks communicate with the process engine to fetch and complete work items. This decouples task execution from the workflow engine and allows different applications to work on tasks independently.
• Event-driven architecture: With Camunda, you can implement an event-driven architecture that triggers processes in response to events. Applications can publish events without being aware of the internal details of the processes they activate, thus decoupling the event producers from the process consumers.
• REST API and message queues: Camunda provides REST APIs and can integrate with message queues (like AMQP, Kafka, etc.), allowing applications to interact with the process engine without being directly linked. Applications can push and pull information from the process engine as needed, decoupling them from each other and the engine itself.
• Versioning and deployment: Camunda allows for versioning of process definitions. This means that new versions of a process can be deployed without affecting running instances of older versions. Applications can continue to operate with the process version they were designed for, providing a clear upgrade path without tightly coupling the application lifecycle to the process lifecycle.

By leveraging these features, Camunda enables organizations to maintain a clear separation between their business processes and the applications that support them, facilitating easier maintenance, scalability, and adaptability to change.

The results are in

In his presentation, Shashi discusses how the implementation of Camunda brought immediate and significant improvements:

• Processing time: Claim processing time was reduced by 35%, enhancing operational efficiency.
• Cost savings: Costs per claim lowered by 30%, contributing to financial health.
• Scalability: The solution facilitated expansion into new business areas and adaptability for further growth.

“We cut down 35% of the time in processing the claims and reduced 30% cost per claim since we went live with Camunda.”
– Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Strategic partnerships cement success

To aid in development and implementation, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance engaged with Camunda Platinum Partner NTConsult. Their expertise was invaluable to the successful transition. Shashi cites Camunda and NTConsult’s unwavering support as an invaluable part of the development and implementation process.

“There won’t be any disappointment [with Camunda]. We like it and will continue using Camunda and have NTConsult as our strategic partners for a long time.”
– Shashi Ayachitam, IT Director, The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance.

Streamlined processes have led to quicker resolutions, improved customer satisfaction, and provided a wealth of actionable insights, enabling better decision-making and IT efficiency. The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance plans to extend Camunda’s functionalities to underwriting and customer support. Additionally, they are exploring the integration of AI to enhance process automation further.

We also spoke to Shashi behind the scenes at CamundaCon NYC ‘24, where he candidly discussed their experience and the positive changes that implementing Camunda has afforded his team.

The presentation by Shashi Ayachitam illustrates the transformative power of Camunda’s process orchestration and automation capabilities, something we’re proud to bring to thousands of companies around the world (and even in space). This strategic move has not only resolved current operational challenges for The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance but has also opened doors to new possibilities, ensuring the company remains agile and competitive in the ever-evolving and fiercely competitive insurance market.

Learn more

To learn more about the journey of The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance, you can read their full case study here.

The post Transforming Legacy Workflows at The Norfolk & Dedham Group® Insurance appeared first on Camunda.

As senior principal and senior staff engineer, respectively, Sudipto and Roberto develop the IT ecosystems that help channel new medicines to the right patients through the Cigna Group companies Express Scripts, Accredo, Freedom Fertility, and CuraScript SD.

In New York City at the 2024 CamundaCon, they shared how Camunda’s platform for end-to-end process orchestration is supporting Evernorth’s mission to improve the health and vitality of the people they serve.

Streamlining pharmacy processes from 7 days to 1 day to deliver better outcomes

For some patients, new therapies offer a chance for better health outcomes. For healthcare companies and pharmacy benefit managers, new therapies are an opportunity to provide safer and more affordable medicines to their members. In the healthcare industry, the coordination of care to get the right medicine to the right patient at the right time is critical and can be very complex.

For example, Evernorth’s IT environment includes multiple components that support different types of users, such as web and mobile patient applications, physician portals, and internal applications accessed by technicians, pharmacists, and patient care advocates. These components need to interact with each other in an orchestrated way to create a seamless journey.

Imagine the stress on an oncology patient who cannot get the medication they need because authorization has unexpectedly become invalid or a prescription has expired. These are the types of real-life scenarios Evernorth’s team is continually seeking to improve through better technology.

“In a situation where a patient is going through this kind of a disease, we are with them together every part of the way, and we are here to support them in their journey,” explained Sudipto.

In Evernorth’s previous systems, it took six to seven days to get a response from a doctor. By modernizing Evernorth’s systems with APIs and microservices, and using process orchestration to automate the journey, Evernorth reduced the time to communicate with the doctor to just one day.

“As engineers, we feel a sense of pride,” said Sudipto. “We feel a sense of accomplishment that we are able to help the patient when they need us most.”

Modernizing a complex tech stack

Sudipto explained how over the past six to seven years, they’ve built composable APIs with defined bounded context that each do one thing and one thing really well. However, their team’s more significant challenge is the complexity of their tech stack, which is made up of legacy and modern apps integrated using messages or exchanging messages across Kafka topics.

As Sudipto described, “Our world is pretty complex. There are multiple domains. There are multiple products. Multiple technologies are integrating with each other to produce a desired outcome.”

The goals Evernorth targeted with modernization were to enable end-to-end processes, support a composable architecture, and improve flexibility.

To improve the architecture, Evernorth’s team introduced an end-to-end process orchestration layer with multiple, different components developed over time.

“End-to-end is not about one scrum team. It’s not about one execution team. It’s across all the teams from an enterprise perspective,” explained Sudipto. “End-to-end means from when you receive the notification within the enterprise boundaries to when you dispense the drug outside. That was what was missing in our ecosystem earlier.”

Now, Evernorth’s end-to-end workflow layer provides seamless communication between the frontend and the composable APIs downstream.

Externalizing business rules for flexibility

Because the pharmaceutical market is very dynamic, flexibility in creating and modifying business processes is very important. The Evernorth team knew they needed to improve flexibility to support the business. They took an approach that externalized the business rules.

Sudipto explained the reasoning behind the approach: “The moment you externalize the business rules, what you have is an ability to invoke these business rules from the APIs and also from the workflows. What it gives you is the same experience to the end user, whether they are building a composable architecture just on APIs or using the workflow to analyze their work products, or if they’re even using the topmost layer of applications. So, it doesn’t matter which level you are using the components or which layer of applications you’re using for composability—your reusability still is adhered to by externalizing the business rules to a separate layer.”

“What we have achieved,” added Sudipto, “ is reusability and composability.”

Evolving from proof of concept to more complex processes

As a proof of concept, Evernorth initially began using Camunda to automate batch processes. The company’s batch processes typically ran at night and consumed their infrastructure. Plus, the turnaround time for batch processing was high. By converting the batch processes to event-driven architectures, Evernorth was able to deliver new value with Camunda.

Next, the team tested Camunda’s capabilities to solve complex challenges and problems. Two of the use cases redesigned in Camunda include orchestration for claims submissions and biosimilar medications.

Use case: Claims submission

Claims submission is very complex in the pharmacy benefit management industry because it’s highly regulated. Evernorth’s team needed to ensure their processes aligned with compliance requirements so they could deliver accurate services to patients and customers. The existing process was an inefficient combination of human tasks and different applications, so they rebuilt the process in Camunda to improve efficiency by automating the entire process.

Roberto credits the collaboration between their business partners and engineering as an important contribution to the project’s success. “We found the BPMN tool very effective, because when we use the BPMN tool during the design part of the process, the same design is going to evolve to the development phase and then to the execution phase. And whatever our business partners help us to build, they are going to see that it is executed.”

Use case: Biosimilars

A biosimilar is a medicine that is very similar to another medicine already in the market. They are important because they expand the ability of patients to get access to expensive therapies. However, the business process of managing a biosimilar is very complex—once started, the process could be interrupted in the middle, go back to the beginning, and jump from the first step to another flow.

Roberto admitted that he had wondered if a business process with highly complex requirements could be built in Camunda. The biosimilars use case was the test. “It can be done,” he told the audience.

The outcomes of the use case proved to the team that Camunda is the right tool for handling complex business processes. Now, when the Evernorth team is determining which solution in their tech stack should be used for a new project, they ask, “Is it a complex business process? Is it a long-running business process? Do they need process orchestration?”

If the answer is yes, the project is a good fit for Camunda.

“Where we have found Camunda to be a real good use case and giving us bang for the buck is anything which is headless. And by headless, what I mean is a process orchestration that’s required, which is complex, and does not need a user… That’s where we have seen Camunda kind of give us really huge value in terms of automation, speed to deliver, and cost-effectiveness.” –Sudipto Dey, Evernorth

Lessons learned

Throughout their presentation, Sudipto and Roberto shared insights and lessons learned along the way. Their advice includes:

• Share the ownership of the business process with your business partners.
• Keep the business process 100% business oriented. Avoid trying to put any technical steps in the process that may confuse business partners. That way, when a business partner looks at a BPMN model, they can understand what is going on.
• Build a business process with the intention that it will change over time, multiple times. When you have the right implementation behind your business process, you can easily change it using drag-and-drop tools in Camunda’s Modeler.
• Visibility is very important. Having visibility of the process is key to finding opportunities for improvement. This is important during the design of a business process so that the business understands the milestones for each step in the process and what actions or data are needed to meet them.
• Take advantage of tools like Cockpit to see and handle incidents so you are continually adapting and improving your processes.
• Consider decoupling your backend code from the business process to create extendability, reusability, and a framework to plug and play your backend code.

They also attribute success in building and orchestrating complex business processes to visibility, simplicity of tools, synergy to adapt to the existing tech stack, and collaboration between IT and business operations but also between the organization and Camunda.

Watch the replay of this presentation to learn more about Evernorth’s experience evolving their Camunda implementation, and connect with an industry expert to learn how Camunda can help you modernize your tech stack to deliver better patient experiences.

The post Cigna Group: Optimizing the Pharmacy Ecosystem with Camunda appeared first on Camunda.

Prashant presents a compelling case study into how U.S. Bank tackled efficiency roadblocks in centralized infrastructure management. Adopting a microservices approach, they used Camunda for process orchestration and automation, and microapps for individual functions and features.

U.S. Bank is an American banking powerhouse headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As the fifth largest commercial bank in the US, it offers a wide array of financial services to a diverse clientele, ranging from personal banking to complex financial solutions for businesses and governmental entities. Last year, it was 149 on the Fortune 500 list and was recognized as a systemically important financial institution by the Financial Stability Board (FSB).

By leveraging microapp architecture and orchestration and automation, the bank is setting new standards for efficiency, flexibility, and scalability in the banking and financial services industry.

The need for agility

The software engineering and IT team at U.S. Bank were tasked with a formidable challenge: managing a centralized infrastructure that simultaneously meets the specific requirements of assorted internal business units and customer-facing functions.

The traditional system required individualized templates or applications per business line, leading to mounting inefficiencies and a disjointed approach. This system also lacked the agility needed to keep pace with the ever-changing regulatory pressures and dynamics of the financial sector.

Microapp architecture and Camunda

Prashant, along with his team, recognized the potential in microapps—tiny, independent applications dedicated to executing a single task or function. In his presentation, he discusses how they advocated for an innovative architecture that would harness both horizontal and vertical microapp structures.

This meant having microapps work in concert for collective functions (horizontal) and having them execute distinct, standalone features (vertical).

The team integrated microapp architecture into their case management system using Camunda, streamlining the process for customer disputes and improving the overall customer experience. Customers can now initiate dispute processes through user-friendly apps connected with backend microservices—a harmonized deployment model designed to serve more diverse business needs with minimal adjustments.

In his presentation, Prashant speaks about how the transition to microapp architecture, with Camunda, saw the creation of specialized microapps for functions such as processing disputes and managing case attachments. This new system empowered U.S. Bank with the ability to seamlessly handle disputes, attach evidence, and integrate services much more efficiently.

During the implementation, the team overcame issues such as ensuring communication between microapps without creating dependencies, addressing latency and complexities during maintenance, and managing the repercussions of individual microapp failures on the overall system.

Prashant also discusses how they introduced feature flagging to dynamically respond to any operational issues, thus maintaining service continuity.

Microapp benefits and Camunda integration

According to Prashant, the adoption of microapp architecture delivered several significant advantages to U.S. Bank:

1. Efficiency: Quick templating for business lines meant expedited responses to customer demands.
2. Scalability: The system could easily integrate new microapps, promoting growth and flexibility.
3. Flexibility: Independent development and deployment of microapps led to quicker iterations and shorter time-to-market for new services.
4. Orchestration: Camunda’s integration facilitated microservices orchestration, offering real-time process management, real-time process observability and troubleshooting, and enhanced data connectivity.

U.S. Bank’s swing to microapp architecture has reshaped their infrastructure management approach, yielding a system that is flexible, scalable, and efficient. Prashant discusses how business units now benefit from speedier, more customized solutions, and the central team can oversee the system with improved control.

This successful architecture sets the stage for future advancements and AI-enabled process orchestration, ensuring that U.S. Bank remains a Fortune 500 leader in innovation and customer-centric service.

The post U.S. Bank Implements Microapp Architecture and Camunda for Efficiency, Flexibility, and Scalability appeared first on Camunda.

Larisa Kvetnoy, Managing Director of Post-Trade Technology at Barclays, and Shakir Ahmed, Barclays’ Head of International Securities Settlements Technology, took the stage at the 2024 CamundaCon in New York City to explain how Barclays is using Camunda to orchestrate the complex post-trade settlement process.

The goal: timely and accurate post-trade settlements

The post-trade settlement process is an exacting one, with multiple steps and firm deadlines based on asset class. Once a trade is executed, it needs to be validated, enriched with additional data for processing, and confirmed bilaterally with the counterparty before settlement. Approximately 10 to 12 functions need to happen in correlation and tight sequence, depending on the financial product and regional regulations. If one function fails, the other functions fail as well.

In a recent interview from behind-the-scenes at CamundaCon NYC ’24, Shakir Ahmed and Larisa Kvetnoy spoke about the transition from legacy systems to microservices architecture, about overcoming the challenges of outdated platforms, and about achieving architectural governance. They discuss the role of Camunda 8 in process orchestration, enhancing Barclays’ operational visibility, agility in regulatory adaptation, and the interplay between microservices and process automation. Discover their insights on resilience, distributed systems, and leveraging Camunda’s cloud-native features for a future-ready post-trade environment.

As a global investment bank, Barclays must ensure timely settlement of investment transactions to manage risk, comply with industry regulations, and ensure liquidity. But a combination of a complex, legacy infrastructure made it increasingly difficult for the post-trade settlement process to execute smoothly from end to end. The team knew they needed to modernize.

The need: tame complexity and increase straight-through processing

Barclays faced three significant industry challenges that ultimately led them to prioritize the modernization of their post-trade settlement process.

First, the banking industry as a whole faces increased regulatory scrutiny. It’s imperative that financial institutions have accurate data and control to explain processes, decisions, and actions to regulators.

Second, transaction settlement cycles are shrinking. In May of 2024, for example, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring most broker-dealer transactions to be settled within a timeframe of the trade date plus one day (“T+1”), one day sooner than the previous T+2 requirement.

Third, the need to stay competitive in the market puts constant pressure on financial institutions to control costs. That means efficiency is critical. But as a long-established bank, Barclay’s enterprise architecture evolved over decades, from manual systems to mainframes to monolithic systems to microservices. And as Larisa described, maintaining the myriads of legacy platforms was not getting any cheaper.

They had already undertaken a program to eliminate redundancy by breaking their legacy, monolithic platforms into respective functions, each represented by a microservice. However, the team quickly realized that managing the interactions between the microservices was becoming too complex. As part of a plan to improve microservices management, they evaluated the potential benefits of an orchestration or choreography approach and chose orchestration because it gave them full control and visibility to all their processes—important for regulatory compliance.

“That’s where we looked at Camunda,” said Larisa. Camunda’s processing speed, scalability, and cloud-native capability were an advantage. “It looked very appealing, especially with the Camunda 8 version. It all started with us downloading the product on the weekend, playing with the features.”

The solution: Use Camunda to orchestrate processes and microservices from end to end

Barclays now uses Camunda for end-to-end process orchestration and the orchestration of microservices.

They began by building out a use case for an FX forward trade process, starting with trade capture through all the steps of validation, enrichment, confirmation, exception handling, settlement matching, and reporting. A message bus provides instant and constant persistence and distribution, and Camunda, as the “orchestrator,” coordinates tasks back and forth.

At all times, the orchestrator has the ultimate intelligence of what needs to happen in sequence, which is important because FX forward trades are an asset class with a high volume of trades and frequent complications with matchings and confirmations. Though Barclays’ exception handling currently remains embedded in legacy platforms, the team was able to integrate it into the new Camunda architecture, allowing them to define incidents and exceptions very quickly, tag them, categorize them appropriately, and place them in the correct queue so they can be review and addressed.

“The fact that we are able to coexist with a 30-year-old technology and have connectivity through adapters shows you the fungibility of this,” said Shakir.

The outcomes: better speed, scale, agility, visibility, and resilience

With Camunda acting as the orchestrator and the use of the post-trade bus, Barclays was able to build a loosely coupled architecture and separation of concerns.

To date, the team has seen significant benefits from the new architecture, including enhanced speed, scale, and resilience; improved control and visibility; error recovery; agility; and improved time to market.

They appreciate the additional benefits of the new Camunda architecture, as well. For example, Camunda Operate gives the team “constant eyes and ears on our event,” said Shakir. “Previously, it was hard to answer questions about the status of trades, because with monolithic systems, we have to run database queries. Having a console like Operate lets us see where we are at any given time. That alone is a major benefit of the tool.”

The automatic backup ability of the cloud-native Zeebee engine and Camunda’s capability to quickly recover from a state of failure are also key benefits of the new architecture. Shakir explained, “If someone has to replay 10,000 trades because of an outage, doing that on the fly with a UI console is very powerful.”

The next step: ramping up process volume by 14x

Based on the success of the Camunda architecture, the Barclays team has plans to expand the use of Camunda in 2025.

Barclays is currently supporting approximately 35,000 processes per day on Camunda. In 2025, the team expects to scale up the volume by 14x, to about one-half million processes per day. Continuing on their substantial modernization journey, they also plan to decommission their cash settlement system, which currently runs on a mainframe, and move cash settlements to Camunda.

As Shakir commented, “The reality is, most banks are not going to be able to get the budget to just shut off your legacy platforms and build brand new, right? So, you have to coexist, and you have to deprecate the legacy while building up your services. This architecture lets us do that.”

Get the full story: Watch the CamundaCon replays

Barclays’ story is an example of how a process orchestration layer can help organizations take a phased approach to modernization without slowing output. Hear more from Shakir and Larisa at the link below, and watch additional on-demand presentations from our financial industry clients, such as BNY, U.S. Bank, and Capital One. Also, if you’d like to know more about how the team at Barclays transformed their post-trade settlements offering with Camunda, please take a look at our ‘Barclays’ Post-Trade Core Services Technology Transformation with Camunda‘ success story.

The post How Barclays Transformed Post-Trade Settlements with Camunda appeared first on Camunda.

Staying ahead of the curve and providing customers with a smooth banking experience, plus adhering to regulatory standards and best practices, isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s a critical necessity expected by modern customers.

Process orchestration is crucial for banking services—it streamlines operations, can greatly enhance the customer experience, helps ensure regulatory compliance, and accelerates the delivery of financial products to market with outstanding ROI.

96% of IT professionals consider process automation to be essential to digital transformation, and Rabobank, the leading Dutch multinational bank, recognized this imperative.

They found themselves struggling with slow process optimization and rigid systems due to frontend embedded process logic. This resulted in inefficiencies in sales and customer onboarding, as well as challenges in meeting regulatory demands. To address these issues and modernize its legacy systems, Rabobank recently implemented Camunda 8 SaaS for smarter automation orchestration.

To talk to us about their journey, Rabobank business analyst Pascal van Puijvelde and IT lead Louwris Wernink joined us at CamundaCon NYC 2024.

In their presentation, they talk about how the IT team grappled with slow production times , under their old system, its rigid processes, and the misalignment between business and IT. This impacted their ability to run sales and customer onboarding processes efficiently and to adhere to essential regulatory requirements. Pascal and Louwris spoke to us about their adoption of Camunda 8 as a result of their need to orchestrate automation intelligently, and to modernize legacy systems. They explained how SaaS is the right answer for them to set up their team for success while complying with banking regulations.

The genesis of change

With a legacy system that was becoming increasingly obsolete, Rabobank faced the challenge of revamping its IT infrastructure to improve efficiency and reduce loan approval times.

After careful consideration of various platforms, including Mendix, Pega, and serverless options, Rabobank chose Camunda for its agility, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities.

Strategic implementation

Rabobank managed the implementation of Camunda by providing customized training for various roles, establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) for ongoing support and best practices sharing, and conducting regular meetings to address challenges. Additionally, they promoted incremental learning and utilized technical account managers from Camunda for expert advice, ensuring a well-supported transition for all team members.

The bank worked closely with Camunda’s dedicated technical account managers (TAMs) to refine its initial designs and overcome process modeling challenges, to centralize knowledge, to share best practices, and to foster innovation.

“There is a lot of interest across the business. We have an internal Rabobank community around Camunda, which is starting to grow. We really don’t have to sell it internally. There is a lot of discovery going on, and the need for orchestration is out there.”
–Louwris Wernink, IT Lead, Rabobank

A comprehensive training sprint was also conducted across multiple roles within the organization to ensure smooth adoption and enablement of the new platform.

“Having a BPMN approach gives us more insight into business requirements in an earlier stage, but also where the complexity is where we need some more fine-grained details on requirements. You get closer to the actual complexity that you have to build.”
– Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

Navigating challenges with finesse

Adhering to stringent banking regulations, the Rabobank team talked about how they negotiated SLAs and ensured data security and privacy were uncompromised during the transition to Camunda.

The bank developed a structured approach to manage the increase of information during the implementation phase, ensuring that each team member was adequately trained and supported and received the support needed to adapt to the new system.

The SaaS solution has allowed Rabobank to focus on enhancing customer experiences rather than infrastructure administration.

“For quite some time, SaaS has been the favorite solution for us. We want to focus on the fun stuff, and that for us is creating that customer experience and not running a Kubernetes cluster. Do what you’re good at—leave the rest to Camunda.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

The road ahead

Rabobank established process KPIs to measure the impact of Camunda on time-to-market and overall efficiency, expecting in excess of a 30% improvement in their development cycles.

“Our time-to-market was too long. With Camunda 8, we expect to reduce this by at least 30%. That means going from a year to around 6-8 months, and when each sprint currently costs around €50,000, it soon adds up if you’re fast.”
Pascal van Puijvelde, Business Analyst, Rabobank

As the journey progresses, Rabobank continues to refine its processes, aiming for a library of reusable components, leveraging AI-enable process orchestration in the future, and optimizing their orchestration for even greater customer satisfaction.

Rabobank’s presentation and journey with Camunda are a testimony of the power of embracing digital transformation in the banking sector through leveraging process orchestration and automation—leading to a competitive advantage and critical necessity that users expect.

Rabobank is a cooperative bank with a mission, having been dedicated to creating a future-proof society and tackling major societal challenges for 125 years. A critical part of this is trust and the customer experience. By thoughtfully integrating a new process orchestration platform, the bank has positioned itself for heightened agility, successfully circumnavigated negative regulatory scrutiny, improved customer service, and served its customers in the way they expect services to be delivered, and sustained growth.

After their presentation, Louwris and Pascal joined us for an informal chat as a part of our ongoing Conversations with Friends and Customers series for 2024/25. In their behind-the-scenes interview, they spoke further about their Camunda 8 journey, their plans for the future with AI integration, why SaaS was the right choice for them, and how Rabobank’s IT department can now run €5.4 million worth of sales processes and support six million customers per year with Camunda.

The post Embracing Process Orchestration in the Digital Transformation Journey of Rabobank appeared first on Camunda.