Digital services enhance the banking experience
Khan Bank is the largest commercial bank in Mongolia, providing a full range of financial services and products to an estimated 82% of the Mongolian population including SMEs, corporate customers, and around 2.8 million private consumers.
Some 6,000 employees work in nearly 550 Khan Bank branches across Mongolia. It also operates over 800 ATMs and processes around 70% of the country’s daily banking transactions.
Around 80% of Mongolian households use at least one Khan Bank product, and its physical banking service is complemented by an award-winning digital offering, including a mobile app.
“Khan Bank is the industry leader in Mongolia because we’re increasingly focusing on information technology,” says Gansuren Ga, Head of IT End-User Services at Khan Bank. “Most of our services are now available digitally.”
Standardized processes drive efficiency
Prior to offering most services digitally, the bank had gone through a phase of transformation.
“Previously in 2016, before digitization, many IT incidents weren’t really seen as critical, and recovery could be time-consuming with little transparency for staff,” Gansuren explains. “Also, change management was handled manually with traditional paper-based processes.”
Khan Bank needed a single platform to speed up its digital operations and workflows. This would replace its legacy disconnected and complicated ticketing and incident response systems, improving collaboration between IT teams and the enterprise.
“We wanted to streamline IT service delivery and seamlessly connect the branch network,” Gansuren adds. “By consolidating redundant, legacy service tools into one system, we were aiming to standardize service processes, improve incident response, and drive efficiency.”
A primary platform for more than 200 IT services
After running proofs of concept with three platforms, ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) quickly emerged as the platform that met all Khan Bank’s criteria. The Now Platform automates, optimizes, and modernizes work processes across functions to flow seamlessly. By linking vital business systems and workflows from several departments onto a single platform, ServiceNow helps businesses optimize their current technology investments, reduce expenses, and significantly enhance key business operations.
“The ServiceNow flexible approach to workflows and low-code support were key considerations for our new ITSM platform,” Gansuren recalls. “We were also impressed by its ability to grow and align with our customers’ needs and pioneer exciting new functionalities.”
Gansuren also praises the support provided by ServiceNow during the selection process.
“The ServiceNow support team ensured that we knew what Khan Bank could gain from ITSM,” she adds. “They were very professional, didn’t hesitate to answer questions, and raised important ideas.”
Within a few months, Khan Bank had an integrated solution with the capabilities to handle service management and provide full support for digital transformation across the bank.
“It’s a cloud-based system so we had a high-quality solution ready to run in just five months,” says Gansuren. “There were no obstacles or areas where we weren’t completely satisfied.”
ServiceNow is the primary platform delivering IT services to the bank’s 6,000 employees. Gansuren adds, “For 227 different IT services in seven departments, ServiceNow ITSM is the first point of contact for our IT personnel and staff.”
99.9% service uptime despite 222% rise in digital changes
By implementing ServiceNow ITSM, Khan Bank has replaced its siloed and disconnected IT system into one platform, transforming the employee and customer experience. Service delivery is now streamlined thanks to intelligent workflow automation, significantly reducing manual processes.
“ServiceNow ITSM has changed how IT service is managed at Khan Bank,” says Gansuren. “With purpose-built core capabilities for work, there are no more verbal or email requests. Everything comes through a central point of contact.”
ServiceNow is also a central pillar of Khan Bank’s ITIL-based strategy, which helps Khan Bank align its IT services with the evolving needs of the enterprise.
“ServiceNow ITSM enables easy escalations and tracking of SLAs that were not previously possible for us,” Gansuren adds. “ITSM also has the flexibility to allow Khan Bank to incorporate unique processes and workflows.”
A clear indicator of ServiceNow ITSM’s success at Khan Bank is the volume of cases handled.
It typically handles around 30,000 incidents a year and reached a peak of over 47,000 in 2019. Approximately 67% are resolved at the first level. However, Khan Bank is still able to provide efficient service without adding more employees to the level-one support team.
“This is a time of tremendous digital evolution for Khan Bank,” Gansuren explains. “The number of digital changes implemented rose from 1,154 in 2016 to 3,716 in 2023, but we maintained a system availability SLA of 99.9%.”
Collaboration enables speed of service
Khan Bank service agents are now resolving issues faster than ever. Before adopting ServiceNow ITSM, a support ticket would typically take up to five days to resolve; now it takes an average of 10 minutes.
For Gansuren, the improvement in system uptime is contributing to the bank’s digital evolution and change management.
A three-year digitization strategy between 2021 and 2023 has driven the growth of digital services and the wider embrace of technology. Most of the bank’s retail services are now 100% online.
Driving this digital evolution is a growing IT operation that is increasingly focused on managing the complexities brought about by the digitization initiatives, and delivering key service improvements for Khan Bank. Keeping these services running smoothly and efficiently is essential.
Built on a single, low-code platform to streamline workflows across functions, ServiceNow ITSM has helped the bank cope with these increasing demands and maintain an excellent IT operation across the multiple IT departments.
“ServiceNow ITSM connects eight departments with 390 IT personnel, such as IT end-user services, IT production systems, and IT delivery service departments,” Gansuren says. “This creates collaboration that ultimately helps to drive SLAs such as speed of service for end users or customers.”
Adding to the new levels of collaboration between teams is the ability to monitor IT vendor activity and performance though the Now Platform.
“Vendor management and governance used to be very manual, using emails and spreadsheets,” Gansuren adds. “But with ServiceNow ITSM, everything is much more transparent. The vendor management team is creating its own dashboards, which enables much more effective management.”
Addressing key security considerations
As Khan Bank introduces new services to customers, its list of potential cybersecurity risks grows longer. The Now Platform plays a vital role in Khan Bank’s cybersecurity plan, whether it’s supporting its cyberattack response strategy or ensuring the security and reliability of its new applications.
“We customized ServiceNow ITSM to cater to this,” Gansuren explains. “We’re developing lots of applications at the bank, so security has become a huge consideration.”
ITSM tracks cyber attack responses and the proactive measures taken to prevent them, showing Khan Bank the resiliency of its security processes—and areas that can be improved.
“The ultimate objective is reliability and security of our digital services,” says Gansuren. “Security is the responsibility of every IT staff member at Khan Bank, and the activities of multiple IT departments are now tracked and managed on ServiceNow ITSM.”
ITSM Pro for employees and customers improved experiences
Khan Bank is looking to explore more ServiceNow solutions, including ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) and ServiceNow ITSM Pro. ITSM Pro has the potential to accelerate key DevOps processes, enable analytics related to performance and major incidents, and contribute to the management of continuous improvement.
Gansuren is particularly enthusiastic about ITSM Pro’s predictive analytics tools and the preventive capabilities offered by ITOM’s AIOps capabilities.
“ServiceNow ITOM has the potential to prevent as many as 60% of our incidents,” she explains. “It covers everything from our complex infrastructure to operating systems and applications.”
With a future upgrade to ServiceNow ITSM Pro, Khan Bank expects the Virtual Agent capability to reduce agent workload with automatic routing of requests, improving time to resolution for low-complexity requests through AI-powered self-service capabilities. Gansuren says, “We foresee this will improve the employee experience when resolving large volumes of requests, making it easier to scale customer service operations to meet the needs of our customers.”
Since 2019, Khan Bank has adopted the DevOps culture and leveraged DevOps tools to bridge any gaps, especially when customers are constantly demanding releases of applications.
“We’re also very excited about DevOps Change Velocity,” Gansuren adds. “Our change management processes are very well structured, but customers demand new releases almost daily. DevOps Change Velocity will help to fully automate and complete the DevOps circle.”
This will accelerate the approval process for new applications while also reducing human error. It’s also a key component of Khan Bank’s digital strategy, and one that will prepare it for yet more innovation.
“ServiceNow ITSM is playing a very critical role in improving both the employee experience and customer experience,” Gansuren concludes. “We want our products and services to be user friendly and easy to access. That’s the digital ambition that ServiceNow is helping us to achieve.”