Strategic Report Strategic Report Strategic Report Financial Additional Overview Strategy Performance Governance Statements Information Efficiency gains – optimisation project Lean In 2018, Bank of Georgia launched project “Lean”, which In Corporate Investment Banking, we aim to halve the aims to transform and optimise the operations in three time needed to issue a corporate loan to 15 days. We areas of the Bank: service centres, processes and functions. have introduced an evaluation system, whereby by the end of each loan processing cycle the involved parties are Transformation of the service centres has been carried out encouraged to voice their feedback to each other. We have with the purpose of increasing the number of customers rearranged the roles and responsibilities within the teams, served and products sold to them. Currently, all of the aiming to ultimately eliminate duplicated and scattered flagship branches of the Bank have been transformed to tasks. The launch of the new scheme in a trial mode become more productive and efficient in their services. We revealed that the process cycle time can potentially set up a queue management system to improve customer be reduced by 50%, and the number of errors by 30%. experience, increase client satisfaction and retention rates CIB will start applying the new process in 2019. by offering speedier and higher quality services. As a result, 98% of the clients entering a transformed service In addition to transforming the processes in order to centre are served, while the figure before the optimisation achieve a more efficient utilisation of resources, we have used to be 83%. We introduced frequently revised shorter- also optimised the functions in several departments and term key performance indicators for our bankers, which plan to work with others in the nearest future. We have are aimed at boosting sales by increasing the number of improved the efficiency of task flows in the operations clients served and products sold per banker ratios. As a support unit and streamlined the processes in the cash result, the sales in transformed service centres increased and securities settlements unit. We have also reshuffled by 20%. Client satisfaction also saw a positive trend the functions in corporate lending, so that the corporate having reached 90%, in line with our future target of 95%. bankers focus increasingly more on sales and relationships with clients. Moreover, we freed SOLO branches from We have optimised the way we process mortgage back office functions, which we instead centralised in applications in Retail Banking and loan applications in the headquarters of the Bank. We are in the process of Corporate Investment Banking, and plan to transform the implementing the same changes in SME banking and in processes in other segments as well. In order to efficiently Wealth Management. In 2019, we plan to identify all the utilise the time and human resources needed to process back office operations throughout Bank of Georgia that mortgage applications and reduce the number of errors to can be transferred to and centralised in the headquarters. a minimum, we introduced standard operating procedures and checklists. As a result, we decreased the number of errors by 50%. In addition to applying new procedures, we also updated the flow of application processing, which now includes a Time to Yes concept and allows us to inform clients of the outcome of their application within an hour from its submission. Overall, our goal was to decrease the amount of time needed to process a mortgage application from 7.5 days to only 3 days. Currently, this number stands at four days. Annual Report 2018Bank of Georgia Group PLC 41