BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT IN NIGERIAN COMMERCIAL BANKS CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Right from the early influences Business Process Management at the informal level has continued to exist even in the trade by barter era. There was a situation where goods were being exchanged without the use of money system, management was relevant because of group relationships that were aimed at making exchanges. The goods were the resources, the processes were not developed as it is today. There were instruments for counting but not the type of machine we have today;method has continued to exist (Anyanwu, 2000:58).

Maintenance was not well developed, the process consisted of machine, method, maintenance; there are always the way of doing things. Part of the early influences was the role of gold smiths; they were custodian of silver, gold coins, which were the inputs of the system then. Business Process Management continues to develop; the Total Quality Management was the fore runner of Business Process Management (O’brien,2000:40).

Quality is concerned with fitness for use and meeting the expectations of both internal and external customers so that they do not come back to complain. The internal customers are the workers in the different departments and their managers; the external customers are shareholders and others like stakeholders, capital providers, suppliers, the regulatory agent and the public at large (Bounds, 1994: 20).

The Japan Miracles have been attributed to use of quality circles. Business Process Management as a holistic concept has drawn from Total Quality Management.It involves the continual improvement in quality that is company wide involving every staff from the chairman of the Board of Directors to the least workers in the shop floor  (Ross,1995:23).

Business Process Management (BPM) involves the alignment of organizational goals and objectives to ensure improvement in the performance of commercial Banks. Goals are long term aims at a point in the organization missions while objectives are short-term aim at a point in the organization missions (Smith and Fingar, 2007:73). There are two ways of looking at performance.Performance is the extent to which the organizational objectives are been achieved. Secondly, performance is the extent to which an organization is fulfilling the promises made to stakeholders (Yomere and Osaze, 2007:32).

BPM has continued to be relevant to the performance of the Commercial Banking in Nigeria. The ideas of Commercial Banking in Nigeria started in 1890 when the monetization of the Nigeria economy was growing side by side with barter trading. By then, the use of cash had grown sufficiently throughout WestAfrican(Aremu and Saka, 2006: 141).

The modern Banking in Nigeria dates back to 1892, with the establishment of the Africa Banking Corporation in Lagos. In 1893,a merchant named Sir Alfred a shipping magnate in Liverpool, England, took the initiative for the establishment of bank in the Lagos office of Elder Demester Company.In addition, with the support of the colonial government, the formation of the British Bank of West Africa (BBWA) was announced in May 1893 and started operation on March 31st 1894,which later metamorphosized toStandard Bank of Nigeria and presentlyFirst Bank of Nigeria Plc,while Barclays Bank Nigeria becamethe present Union Bank of Nigeria (Aderinto, 2007:11).

There were lots of attempts in the 1930s to established indigenous commercial Banks, unfortunatelymost of the banks failed because of inept management and lack of adequate capital.However three indigenous commercial banks survived namely: National Bank of Nigeria, Agbormagbe Bank and African Continental Bank of Nigeria (Nwankwo, 2008: 52).

In 1946 the first colonial Development planning was introduced by the British government.It was aimed at getting primarily raw material from colonybetween 1960-1985.There were four post-independent development plans of which non of them had the objective of developing commercial banks in Nigeria. Between 1958 and 1959, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was established to regulate Banking in Nigeria (Anyanwu, 2000:37).

There were indigenous Decrees in 1972 and 1977. In 1977 the Federal Government of Nigeria took 40% shares in some major commercial Banks.In 1988 the Nigeria Deposit  Corporation was established  to insure the deposit of some commercial banks in Nigeria. On 1st July 2004, CBN came up with a directive stipulating that the commercial banks in Nigeria should increasetheir capital base in terms of shareholder funds from less than N3billion to N25billion within one half year ending 31st December 2005. The method used for the recapitalization exercise included: margin, consolidation, acquisition, internal public offer, deposit, equity, use of internal and external investors; at the end of day the number of banks reduced from 89 to 25 banks. The IBTC/Stanbic merger reduced the number to 24, the re-insuring of the license of Savanah Bank Plc has also brought the number back to 25 banks (CBN, 2010:10).

From 2005, the commercial bankshave continued to face a lot of challenges such as downsize, salary cutting, insider abuse, the need for further re-capitalization of the banks increase in the regulations, by CBN, Nigeria Deposit Insurance Company (NDIC).There was the removal and trail in court  of the Chief Executive Officers of some  commercial banks in Nigeria by the Federal Government (CBN,2010:27).

Obamuji (2010:34) posits that the changing dynamics of commercial banking in Nigeria due to the challenges posed by deregulation of the financial sector, globalization operation, technological innovation and prudential requirements such as consolidation and re-capitalization exercise of 1st July 2004 in the banking sector force players at all levels to re-engineer their entire business organizations. The banking operations and functions which are intended to meet the emerging challenges call for innovative banking practices through BPM.This is to enable Nigerian commercial banks to incorporate strategic innovative customer schemes, in order to bridge the service gap inherent in Nigerianbanks since 1892 to  improve performance and out perform competitors.

Leopold, Harris and Watson (2005:231) states that BPM is a field of Management focused on aligningorganization such as Commercial Banks with wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic Management approach that promote business effectiviness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology to improve performance.

Zairi (1997:73) agree that BPM is  abest practice management principle that will help banks seeking to improve operational efficiencies, meet customer demands more quickly and leverage existing technology investment.

Smith and Fingar (2003:126) agree and posit that BPM is a structured method of understanding, documenting, modeling, analysing, simulating, executing, and continuously changing end-to-end business processes and all relevant resources in relation to Bank’s ability to add value  to the business.While McAdam (1996:98) posits that BPM covers the entire business process lifecycle and consolidates methodologies and techniques from a number of previous approaches including Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), Process Innovation , Kaizen, Lean Management, Total Quality Management and Constraint theory . BPM utilizes current technology to provide organizations like commercial banks with the ability to map and re-model their business process, deploy processes as applications that are integrated with existing systems and provide managers of the banks with the functionality to the monitor, analyze, control and improve the execution of those process in real time.

Nwankwo (2008:60) affirms that the challenges have brought BPM to the fore. The formal BPM was developed in the 2000s. It is now a very important business enabler of the bank that it has impacted positively on the performance of the banks, and have helped to out- perform the competitors and increase efficient service delivery among others.

 

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

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