10 telltale signs that your bank needs a Business Rule Engine

Banks and financial institutions deal with a vast amount of data and complex business processes daily. To manage this complexity efficiently and effectively, they often employ a business rule engine. A business rule engine allows organizations to define, manage, and execute business rules independently from the core applications, empowers banks to make informed decisions, respond quickly to market changes, ensure compliance, and improve operational efficiency, all of which are essential for success in the financial industry. Despite the above-stated advantages, financial institutions keep the processes manual not realizing what they are missing out on.

Based on our experience, these are the 10 telltale signs that your financial institution needs a business rule engine.

1. Dependency on Technical Teams to Write Business Rules Banking leaders depend on technical teams to write the business rules for new product launches and modifications. Business teams spend a lot of time doing the knowledge transfer and testing the rules once implemented. A business rule-engine with no-code and an intuitive user interface can help business leaders write their own business rules, making it faster to launch new products and implement changes.
2. Increasing Regulatory Compliance Complexity Banking and Financial Services Institutions across the globe are struggling to keep pace with regulatory change, and, quite often, grappling with the sheer volume and the complexity of these updates can be a laborious, up-hill battle. As per a survey by MetricStream, over 19% of respondents suggested it took them over a year to implement regulatory changes. If your bank is facing increasingly complex regulatory requirements that require frequent updates and modifications, a business rule engine can help centralize and automate compliance rules, ensuring consistent adherence to regulations.
3. Delays in Launching New Products The bank has a great idea for a new product within the category, but it takes them a couple of months to launch the new product. Often losing the momentum and the first-mover advantage. If your bank struggles to introduce new products or services due to rigid systems and processes, a no-code business rule engine can provide the agility needed to define and update product rules and eligibility criteria easily.
4. Lack of Personalization In this highly competitive banking world, gaining customer’s loyalty and offering them the best of personalized services and products, based on their individual needs and preferences, is the need of the hour. 70% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies that understand how they use their products/services. A business rule-engine to offer personalized recommendations based on existing data, including customer profiles, touchpoints, customer propensity, and affinity to identify the target segment, will certainly help to present the most relevant financial product to the customer based on their needs.
5. Lack of Instant Offers The idea of offering ‘right here, right now’ is becoming a key differentiator in the banking industry today. Customers today are reluctant to wait for days to borrow money or for transactions to complete and would move away to competition, for lack of an instant offer from the financial institution. If your bank is struggling to offer personalized instant offers, a business rule engine can expedite the loan approval process by automating risk assessment and compliance checks, leading to faster and more efficient loan decisions.
6. Inconsistent Decision-making If there are inconsistencies in the decision-making process within your bank, leading to varying outcomes or contradictory actions, a business rule engine can help standardize decision-making by enforcing predefined rules consistently.
7. Complex Pricing or Fee Structures If your bank offers a variety of products with complex pricing or fee structures or if you are a financial products aggregator, a business rule engine can handle the calculations and ensure accurate and consistent application of pricing rules across different banks, products, and services.
8. Decentralized Policies Financial institutions rely on a wide range of information, documents, and policies to make decisions, however, managing and using all these policies decision-making can be challenging, as it’s often present in physical forms or is spread across disparate business systems, spreadsheets, and data silos. This lack of centralized management of policies/rules, which should be referred for every case, makes decisions unreliable and prone to errors. A business rule-engine helps centralize otherwise dispersed rules silos and eliminates the need of separate updates in the same rule across the IT landscape, making decisions less prone to errors.
9. Data Integration Challenges If your bank deals with data from multiple sources or systems and struggles to integrate and validate data for decision-making processes, a business rule engine can streamline data integration and ensure consistent data quality.
10. Shortage of Compliance Staff Banks’ risk and compliance departments are under increasing pressure. They face deeper scrutiny from authorities and must adhere to an increasingly stricter laws and regulations. The complexity of dealing with huge quantities of data and an acute shortage of compliance experts make it even more difficult to deal with the situation. If your bank is struggling with staffing issues for compliance professionals, a centralized business rule engine can automate these processes, reducing risks and improving efficiency.

If your bank experiences several of these signs, implementing a business rule engine can significantly enhance operational efficiency, improve compliance, streamline decision-making processes, and drive better customer experiences.