The banks of Canada were established in 1980 and initially held a monopoly in the sector. However, in 1999, foreign banks were granted permission to offer full-service banking. INC comprised two entities – an international INNING group located in the Netherlands that provided various financial services worldwide and the INNING Direct Bank located in Canada. In 2000, Basil Bell, who held the position of senior vice president of operations at INNING Direct in Toronto, Canada, faced concerns regarding the bank’s expanding client base. This growth was causing issues such as difficulties in scaling up the staff due to the need to maintain a limit on offsets.
For instance, the individual believed that the back house had reached its maximum capacity in terms of the number of staff members it could accommodate. As a result, Hadley MacDonald was assigned to address this issue. The solution he proposed was to leverage technology to simultaneously reduce the number of staff and enhance operations. To begin with, the focus was on evaluating the procedure for opening new accounts since there was no forecasting or benchmarking method to assess when and how staff could be augmented.
In order to reduce workload, the INNING bank decided to enhance the process of acquiring new accounts. The bank aimed to minimize staff as they would have to pay additional wages for any overtime hours, which was against their intentions. Another improvement they made was in the mailbox, where they introduced two new machines to increase the speed of mailbox operations. Additionally, they enhanced systems such as processing new applications. Several more improvements were implemented. Bell, the bank’s decision-maker, envisioned these changes as long-term investments.
