In today’s digital era, financial institutions are rapidly redefining how people interact, transact, and experience financial services. They are increasingly adopting advanced digital technologies to automate routine tasks, optimise workflows, and improve digital customer journeys across their product and service lines. Consequently, FIs can reduce operational redundancies while empowering employees with digital tools to facilitate personalised services and drive organic business growth.

FIs need to identify and track key productivity metrics at both the organisational and employee levels to ensure that the organisation’s productivity remains on an upward trajectory. These insights can then be used to implement strategic changes that enhance customer satisfaction and boost long-term shareholder value creation. Tracking the right productivity metrics can unlock new efficiencies, improve service delivery, and drive long-term shareholder value.

Productivity Metrics

When it comes to employee productivity metrics, they vary significantly. Measuring employee productivity can often be a complex task that requires assessing each member’s contribution to the organisation’s profitability, capital adequacy, liquidity, and risk management objectives. For those involved in deploying the institution’s capital and in client-facing roles, productivity is often calculated by considering the revenue/sales per employee, profitability per employee, and new account additions by each employee within a specific time. Similarly, employees involved in support and back-end functions are evaluated based on the number of transactions completed within a given period, turnaround times, error rates, and on-time performance rates to understand their productivity levels. The same is then often compared with industry benchmarks.

In addition to measuring an employee’s contribution to the organisation’s financial performance, it is vital to measure the quality and effectiveness of their work to facilitate positive customer experiences. Matching consumer feedback with employee service can be a valuable metric that gauges whether higher productivity also results in better customer satisfaction levels.

Lastly, it is crucial to monitor manpower costs, as they are one of the largest contributors to operating expenses for financial institutions.

Levers to Enhance Productivity

The objective of productivity enhancement needs to be approached from different directions. One of the most important levers is to automate repetitive tasks like data entry, transaction processing, and compliance reporting. This can significantly free up employee time to focus on more strategic work and eliminate human error. With the advent of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain, even more complex tasks can now be automated.

The second lever is to invest in implementing advanced analytics, which can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, market trends, and areas of operational inefficiency. The third lever is to adopt continuous improvement as a way of working, which can help identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement that can then be addressed through process re-engineering and/or technology interventions. 

Lastly, organisations need to continuously invest in employee training and development so that employees can understand and implement continuous improvement and feel comfortable working with new-age technology.

 In a future where agility and customer-centricity define success, financial institutions must rethink productivity as a dynamic blend of human capability and technological intelligence.