When Louise Leavey arrived at Metro Bank approximately a year ago, the situation was challenging. The UK bank, which had been dealing with well-documented financial struggles and subsequent cost-cutting measures, needed more than incremental improvements. It needed to operate differently.
Leavey, a veteran of 40 years in process reengineering, was brought in with a specific mandate: make the business profitable. What makes Leavey and Metro Bank’s story particularly valuable for other CIOs isn’t just that she succeeded—though in nine months she did achieve measurable results that contributed to the bank’s turnaround efforts—but how she succeeded.
In an industry where IT departments often struggle to align with the business to deliver their strategy, Leavey took a structured, three-pronged approach that freed up capital, engaged the business, and created a foundation for continuous improvement.
Leavey, who has since left Metro Bank and hinted at a new forthcoming role in financial services, spoke candidly about her experience and what other CIOs can learn from it. Her key takeaway: most organizations don’t need more technology—they need to fix the processes they already have.
### Cobbled-Together Processes
Leavey’s assessment of what she found at Metro Bank—and what she’s seen across multiple organizations throughout her career—cuts to a core issue often seen in enterprise IT. She explains:
> “The issue that I found was the IT department never really delivered anything that enabled the business to deliver their strategy. And I think, because of that, the business then just has to cobble together processes. They made their processes up on the hoof and then just lived with them for years and years.”
This is a common theme for people working in financial services (or any sector, to be frank). Employees clicking from one system to the next, copying data into spreadsheets, adding things up on calculators.
When Leavey asked why these workarounds existed, the answer was always the same: there was never any money for IT to help with proper systems.
This realization shaped her entire approach. Rather than immediately proposing new technology investments, Leavey focused first on simplification—finding the money that was already being wasted, which could then fund process improvements.
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### Stage One: IT Simplification
Leavey’s first step was what she calls a “simplification strategy”—looking at every application across Metro Bank and identifying redundancy and waste. The results were noteworthy.
She found 28 data applications costing the bank a million pounds, with half of those applications barely being used. But the most significant inefficiency involved IBM.
Metro Bank was spending millions of pounds with IBM for support on out-of-support applications that weren’t part of the bank’s future estate. In one stunning example, a single phone call cost the bank £3 million in support fees. Leavey says simply:
> “It’s stupid.”
Her solution was to engage Origina, a third-party support provider that could handle IBM, VMware, and HCL support at a third of the price.
This type of vendor rationalization, combined with consolidating and turning off unused applications, freed up millions of pounds.
However, this wasn’t just about cost reduction. Leavey was also implementing a microservices-based IT strategy, which meant that when changes were needed, they could be made faster and more easily. This foundational layer would become essential for the process reengineering work that followed.
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### Stage Two: Heat-Mapping Processes and Engaging the Business
With funding secured, Leavey moved to the second stage: mapping every process across Metro Bank. And she means every process—including vendors and everything that extends beyond the organization itself.
The mapping exercise produced a diagram with all processes in boxes, showing the cost of every process, how many people were involved, where there were performance issues or KPIs not being met, and where growth areas existed.
Leavey then heat-mapped this entire process landscape, creating a visual representation of the problematic areas.
This is where Celonis entered the picture.
Leavey identified the first seven processes that needed attention and brought in Celonis’ process mining and task mining capabilities. She worked closely with the CFO and business units to build business cases, calculating exactly how much could be saved or reinvested in revenue if processes were improved.
The approach aligned closely with what Celonis has been positioning at its recent Celosphere conference: successful AI deployment requires understanding operational processes first, before applying technology solutions. As Celonis said this week, process intelligence provides the missing operational context that AI needs to actually work in the enterprise.
What made Metro Bank’s implementation particularly effective was how Leavey engaged the business.
She explains:
> “I worked closely with the business units and said, ‘Right, well, we’ve identified these as being your top pain processes. Do you agree with that? We’re going to bring Celonis in and we’re going to put that on the desktops of your process owners.’ And it was, for me, heaven, because the business really wanted it because they’re frustrated with what they’re doing. They’ve never had any money to do it before.”
This engagement solved what Leavey identifies as a key problem: getting technology and business to speak the same language.
Too often, she notes, IT people change core systems without necessarily delivering what the business actually needs.
By starting with process pain points that the business recognized, she created alignment.
The CFO was particularly pleased with one aspect: Celonis could measure productivity before automation and after, providing clear metrics to verify that business cases were being delivered.
The task mining capability put software on employees’ desktops that captured keystrokes and showed exactly where processes were broken, visualized as red lines. When AI was then brought in to automate those processes, Metro Bank was targeting 20-30% productivity improvements with clear before-and-after measurements.
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### Stage Three: Data, AI, and Innovation
The third prong of Leavey’s strategy was data and AI—what she describes as “the cherry on the top.”
With clean processes and a solid IT foundation in place, Metro Bank could now focus on data governance, data ownership, and establishing a single source of truth using platforms like Snowflake or Databricks.
But Leavey’s interests extended beyond the foundational work into what she calls “the cherry on the cherry on the top”—innovation through AI use cases.
She discovered SEI AI, a California-based early-stage company focused on voice generative AI in financial services.
The use case addressed a key pain point in banking: the rekeying of information during customer interactions.
With voice generative AI, when a customer calls and speaks to a relationship manager about onboarding, the interaction can be handed over to a voice agent. The customer talks to the agent, which asks questions, completes onboarding documents, and feeds information back into systems using generative AI—all without manual data entry.
Leavey sees this as where AI is heading:
> “You’re giving them 50% productivity. The customers are happy. They’re not waiting on hold on the phone lines to speak to somebody. They’re not frustrated because things aren’t being done. It just happens.”
This mirrors what other organizations are discovering at scale.
At the same Celosphere conference, DHL demonstrated how combining process intelligence with AI could screen 100% of expense reports, and Deutsche Telekom showed how predicting customer issues saved €5 million in six months.
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### Three Lessons for CIOs
Leavey distills her experience at Metro Bank into practical advice for other CIOs facing similar transformation challenges.
**1. Simplification Must Come Before Innovation**
Too many organizations try to layer new technology on top of broken processes and bloated IT estates. Leavey’s approach focuses on finding wasted money first, which creates both the funding and the foundation for everything that follows.
As she notes, the microservices strategy meant “every time you do change, change is much easier, it’s faster, it’s quicker.”
**2. Process Mapping with Business Engagement Is Key**
Leavey emphasizes that simply choosing to implement Celonis or any other platform isn’t enough. The heat-mapping exercise forced conversations with business owners about their real pain points.
When the CFO asked how benefits would be measured, Leavey could point to specific productivity metrics that Celonis would track.
She says:
> “Once you map the processes and you’ve got the foundations, and you see where the processes are broken, you’re making sure that everybody’s clear that what we’re delivering now is not just heavy IT because that’s the way we’ve always done things. This is delivering an outcome to what the business needs, and doing things in a different way with data.”
**3. The Change Portfolio Itself Needs to Change**
Leavey argues that CIOs must shift from thinking that every problem requires changing core systems or heavy coding.
With foundations like Celonis in place and targeted AI solutions for specific pain points, the DNA of how organizations approach change can be different.
She explains:
> “What’s going to be different now is we’ve got the foundations of Celonis, and we’re going to have some individual AI providers— all these pain points that we’re solving with the old-fashioned coding of systems will go away, because you’ve already got it, and it becomes in your DNA to keep changing.”
One of Leavey’s more memorable phrases is about the longevity of transformation efforts.
She argues that the industry should stop using the word “transformation” altogether and instead talk about “evolution” or “continuous improvement.”
She says:
> “Transformation is not for Christmas, it’s for life. And I say we shouldn’t use the word transformation. We should say evolution or continuous improvement. And Celonis gives you that evolution. It constantly drives you forward.”
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Louise Leavey’s journey at Metro Bank offers a compelling roadmap for CIOs and IT leaders looking to tackle longstanding challenges by focusing on process excellence, business engagement, and carefully calibrated innovation. In doing so, she demonstrates that sustainable success comes not from layering new technology on top of dysfunction, but from rethinking how work gets done and continuously evolving to meet the future.
https://diginomica.com/metro-banks-process-engineering-turnaround-cio-louise-leavey-saving-millions-celonis