A company of LBBW
Annual report 2019
Living the Future
“We’re getting better, faster and more efficient”
Quality, time, costs. Berlin Hyp’s IT and digitisation strategy addresses all three levers. With targeted investments, cooperation with innovative digital companies and the establishment of an end-to-end digital workflow, the Bank is working on becoming the most modern real estate financier in Germany.
The strategy to achieve this objective is based on three pillars: external digitisation, internal digitisation and the use of new technologies.
When it comes to external digitisation, the Bank is working on new digital products and business models that will enable it to broaden its range of products and services and align them with customer requirements. Ideas generated within the Bank itself are used to establish a new company, as was the case with the real estate inspection platform Onsite Immo-Agent.
The second pillar is the use of new technologies, for example in HR or in the dialogue with customers. Here, “internal digitalisation” is the centrepiece. The focus is on the introduction of a completely digitalised loans process. This process is established by means of a consistent IT landscape based on SAP HANA.
The basic principle here is that all processes and applications in the Bank run, largely automated, on one IT platform. In addition, all data within Berlin Hyp is stored in a central pool and according to a uniform system; so, interfaces and system discontinuities are largely avoided.
This has several advantages:
- all data only has to be entered once – duplications and inconsistencies are eliminated
- no data has to be transmitted manually – the error rate is reduced
- required information can be generated quickly and prepared as required for the specific need – reworking and time-consuming coordination are minimised.
- Thanks to the uniform standard for data collection and processing, everyone in the Bank can directly comprehend the analyses and conclusions based on it.
“The Bank is becoming real-time ready,”
says Sascha Klaus. Using the example of a newly concluded financing agreement, he explains what this means in concrete terms: in the future, all related data will be recorded at a central location.
If individual information is required, for example for the digital loans check process, it automatically flows into the corresponding application. Reports can thus be generated within a very short time.
The effort of transferring data from one application to the next is eliminated, as is the risk of input or transfer errors.
Berlin Hyp is the first bank to completely digitalise its entire process chain, from customer to reporting, and map it completely in the SAP software standard. “Nobody else is doing this consistently at present”,
reports Thomas Haeske.
Besides better and individually tailored reporting, to which the supervisory authorities also attach great importance, there is a great gain when it comes to the ‘time’ factor. In a completely digitised workflow, the customer advisors are largely relieved of standard and reporting processes. This provides them additional flexibility to analyse and design new financing solutions.
At the end of 2019, the first results become visible, already including central elements of the new digital process. The platform will be established and gradually expanded in the coming months. Further user groups will be integrated into the platform, additional formats defined and further functionalities docked to the system.
Before the end of 2020, further major progress towards the objective of becoming the most modern real estate financier will be achieved. Then, at the latest, the advantages of this digitisation will become clearly visible. As Sascha Klaus explains: “We're getting better, faster and more efficient.”