Degussa Bank + Celonis

Degussa is a German universal bank, founded in 1873 with current total assets of around €6.1 billion.

But it isn’t your usual bank. They’re best known for running "worksite bank shops:" small setups located within — or near — the businesses they serve, so that employees can go to the bank during work hours or on short breaks. They've brought this technique into the digital age by creating the "digital bankshop," which companies can integrate into their intranet, letting people access banking services digitally.

Like any bank, Degussa has strict regulations to adhere to, and turned to Celonis to help with meeting these regulations while improving customer satisfaction. 

Using Celonis as a springboard to success

Degussa first started their relationship with Celonis in 2019 with the Celonis Free Plan. They were looking for a way to optimize their customer onboarding process, in particular the rates for consolidating orders and their recordings. 

In Germany, banks are required to record all security orders taken over the phone to comply with MiFID II and WpHG regulations. By connecting their systems to Celonis, Degussa Bank were able to quickly and easily identify which recordings belonged to which orders — something that was hard to do due to the lack of a unique identifier across different systems. 

And as a result of using Celonis, they were able to improve their recording consolidation rate by 12%.

“We first started with the Celonis Free Plan because we wanted to understand what the tool could do, or what we could do with the tool,” explained Degussa Bank’s Group Lead. “We were really surprised and impressed, and so in 2020, we started using the paid version.” 

Moving on to internal control

While Degussa bank had seen significant value from the insight Celonis was able to provide, there was still a great deal of manual work happening, and they realized Celonis could help reduce the workload on their people. 

They used the Celonis Platform to evaluate internal processes and discovered they weren’t using automation to the level they could be.

“We were able to improve our automation rate,” the Group Lead explained. “People knew the automation rate in some parts of the process was bad, but we could show it to them, identify exactly where a lot of — often unnecessary time — was spent. This, combined with the ability to show them what it would be like with automation, really encouraged them to embrace the automation.”

Degussa wholeheartedly embraced Celonis’ Action Engine, using it for things like the generation of control samples for the recording consolidation rate — allowing users to not only be alerted to potential issues, but to document and often solve them directly in Celonis.

Looking for the next big leap

So, what’s next for Celonis and Degussa Bank? 

“We have really learned a lot in the last two and a half years. So now we know what to focus on and where to improve our processes,” explained the Group Lead. 

“We started with customer-centric processes because we wanted to get quick results for our customer experience. Then we looked at the compliance topics because in banking, it's a really big deal. Now we’re focusing on identifying which processes are similar to ones we’ve had wins with, so we get very quick results. With each new data source that we connect, we almost exponentially extend the possible use cases that we can tackle.”