Empowering Full Scale Straight Through Processing with BPM

The SNS Bank (the Netherlands) has made a strategic decision to empower her customers on-line by fully automating her business processes. The ability to automate these service channels is achieved by applying Business Process Management (BPM) techniques to existing selling channels. Both the publicly available and internal processes are being revamped into full scale Straight Through Processing (STP) services. This extreme use of online STP is the trigger in a shift that is of crucial importance to cost effective banking in an ever turbulent and changing financial world. The key elements used in implementing these goals continue to be (Free) Open Source Software (FOSS), Service-oriented architecture (SOA), and BPM. In this paper we will present an industrial application describing the efforts of the SNS Bank to make the change from traditional banking services to a full scale STP and BPM driven bank.