Regional Bank Implements Workday Adaptive Planning via Phased Approach to Realize Enterprisewide Data Efficiencies

A regional state-chartered bank based in the Northeastern U.S. worked with Huron to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning in an effort to modernize and integrate its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) capabilities. As a diversified financial services company, it offers a full range of financial services, including commercial banking, mortgage banking, personal banking, wealth management, and trust services. The organization needed the chosen solution to work for all of its different product types and business activities.

With management and investors demanding faster and more flexible reporting and analytics, the bank was struggling to keep up with its existing planning processes. Treasury and FP&A team members were performing numerous low-value and manual tasks to prep data within aging systems, aggregate disparate plans, and validate results, causing long plan cycle times.

At the same time, the regional bank’s existing FP&A tool was in the process of being sunset, so finance leaders were tasked with finding a replacement that would solve for some of the challenges they’d experienced with their current software.

• One of the biggest of these challenges was the manual nature of making net interest margin calculations. It took more than two hours to consolidate the data every time new assumptions or recalculations were required — a cumbersome process for everyone involved.
• The bank’s existing tool also did not give the teams real-time modeling functionality, making it difficult to model rate changes with any degree of accuracy.
• Budgeting was also a fragmented and cumbersome process, conducted for each of the organization’s 12 legal entities.

Leaders knew they needed a solution that would make these tasks less manual and be easier to service and maintain over time. Workday Adaptive Planning fit the bill. The bank is among a swell of financial services institutions migrating their FP&A solutions to Workday. Banking’s niche financial planning and accounting practices can make streamlining core processes challenging. But with the right implementation partners, business agility is not only possible, it’s also more efficient.

Huron set out with a focus on accelerating the bank’s ability to make strategic decisions. With manual and time-consuming workstreams dominating FP&A’s schedule, the implementation team configured an application focused on the ease of use and the limitation of maintenance activities.

Huron’s deep financial services expertise has allowed the organization to develop an enterprisewide connected bank planning framework that is built to support banking’s unique business requirements and modeling complexity.

Project initiatives were facilitated via Huron’s proprietary margin planning, workforce, and capital expenditures accelerators along with an intentionally sequenced implementation road map. This phased approach, in addition to making detailed product planning simple to manage, also shortened the project timeline and provided a solution with better business insights and accuracy.

• Phase 1 of the project focused on the execution of the most foundational aspects of the tool to ensure the bank had everything in place to perform essential functions quickly.
• Phase 2 began the complex work of automating a formerly manual process to allow the finance team members to get back to functioning as strategic advisers rather than data aggregators.
• Phase 3 added additional core functionality to the platform (that wasn’t added in Phase 1) to further create efficiencies across departments and expand enterprisewide reporting capabilities.
• Planning for Phase 4 is still in the works, but it will focus on delivering additional reporting support and optimization.