By Chris Johnston, SVP, Head of Global Banking, Celonis
The financial services industry is currently experiencing one of its most disruptive decades driven through the combination of technological advancements and evolving customer expectations. Among the key disruptors, neobanks have rapidly gained ground by offering mobile-first payments, fully digital experiences, and a strong focus on speed, simplicity, and user-centric design.
Unlike traditional banks, neobanks operate without the burden of physical branches or deeply embedded legacy infrastructure. This lack of “technical debt” gives them a major advantage – agility. They innovate quickly, deploy updates faster, and adapt more readily to shifting customer demands.
By contrast, traditional banks often struggle with fragmented systems, siloed departments and slow-moving processes. Innovation in these banks has been gradual, with room to improve the customer experience. To stay competitive, traditional institutions must find ways to modernise from within. Understanding and optimising what they already have with the help of Process Intelligence.
Bridging the Gap with Process Intelligence
Process Intelligence (PI) gives organisations the ability to see, understand and even improve the flow of work across their systems. It creates a clear view of processes and has the power to unify data across the organisation, giving Enterprise AI both the process understanding and the business context it needs to succeed.
Such technology is already being used in industries like manufacturing and logistics and can serve as a strategic tool in banking. It allows legacy systems to speak the same language, providing a unified view of operations that connect departments, break down silos, and integrates emerging technologies like AI seamlessly into daily workflows.
This opens the door to a more adaptive model of banking, one where every step of the customer journey can be visualised, optimised, and intelligently automated. With PI, banks can pinpoint bottlenecks in onboarding, reduce delays in loan approvals, and automate compliance checks in real time, all powered by live operational data. It captures the relationships between all documents, business processes and people, resulting in a completely unique data source to feed into AI. Instead of applying AI to isolated tasks, banks can embed it into smarter, more connected workflows.
PI does not just modernise banking processes, it redefines what legacy systems are capable of, giving traditional banks the tools they need to innovate with the same speed and confidence as their digital-born rivals.
Staying Ahead of Regulatory Scrutiny
In the banking sector, compliance is non-negotiable, but legacy systems and manual checks often make it difficult to keep pace with regulatory demands. Disjointed audit trails and siloed data leave traditional institutions exposed, especially when compared to neobanks that are often built with compliance-by-design. To close this gap, legacy banks need a more intelligent, connected approach. This is where Process Intelligence proves essential.
PI offers full transparency into how processes run, helping banks quickly identify inconsistencies. By connecting data from source systems, teams can track compliance in real time, flag anomalies and respond to audits with accuracy and speed.
It also helps strengthen fraud detection and risk mitigation by exposing gaps and blind spots that would otherwise go unnoticed. With regulators demanding ever-tighter oversight, PI offers a proactive approach, reducing operational risk and ensuring a higher standard of governance.
By embedding compliance and risk intelligence directly into workflows, PI levels the playing field. Enabling traditional banks to compete with digital-first challengers while maintaining the trust and rigor that define the sector.
Rewriting the Narrative
Legacy banks don’t need to become neobanks to compete with them. They need to become better versions of themselves, more agile, connected, and data driven.
With Process Intelligence, banks can unlock the power of their existing systems and build a future-ready foundation. One that delivers better the customer experience, ensures compliance, and prepares the business for AI-enabled innovation.
In an increasingly digital banking world, PI isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s the key to resilience, relevance, and reinvention.
