During a recent fireside chat, Mimica CEO Tuhin Chakraborty and Director of Engineering at ClearBank Doug Thomson discussed how Mimica empowered the team to scale effectively and efficiently. The case study below is based on their discussion. To watch the full video click here. 

ClearBank is the UK's first new clearing house in over 250 years, and its fastest growing. Income shot up 91%. Transaction volumes rose 54%. 108 million transactions are being processed annually. The question facing Doug Thomson, Director of Engineering, was how to sustain that growth without overhiring.

Explosive growth requires intelligent processes

ClearBank's success created a problem most companies would envy. As transaction volumes climbed, so did headcount. More transactions meant more manual work. More manual work meant more hires.

"We just can't continue on this trajectory," Thomson said. "It's just not sustainable." The goal became clear: enable transactional growth without proportional people growth. To do this he wanted to free people from repetitive work so they could focus on harder problems.

“We've got a lot of smart people and we want them to be solving more interesting problems,” he said.

That meant understanding exactly where inefficiency lived before trying to fix it.

Traditional process discovery didn’t work

The natural instinct to understand how teams work is to go and ask them. Sit down with subject matter experts, run interviews, maybe shadow someone. But none of these approaches tell the whole story.

"A watched pot never boils," Thomson said. “People being watched will do things by the book, and when people are watched they're less likely to take shortcuts that they know, even if it improves the process. If they're being watched, they're less likely to do something that's not within the existing documented process.”

There's a sample size problem too. To get a complete picture of an organization’s workflow it’s necessary to cover the widest audience possible.

"You need a bigger sample size than just one person. Otherwise you might be measuring the quickest person, the slowest, or someone who's just having a bad day, or even a person with the longest or shortest tenure. Using a tool like Mimica gave us a sample size across a variety of skill sets and tenure."

Thomson also considered process mining, a natural starting point for a data-driven engineering team. But process mining relies on ERP system logs, and ClearBank's client services work spans ticketing systems, internal tools, spreadsheets, and team communication. There was no single system of record to reference. “If you can't measure it, you can't know that you're improving it,” he said.

The answer had to come from somewhere else.

Task mining: A smarter path to transformation

Thomson began evaluating task mining vendors. Task mining achieves what process mining couldn’t: a complete picture of how someone works, regardless of what systems they move between.

Task mining also builds process intelligence: a clear roadmap of how different processes work, why they become inefficient, and what can be automated.

He spoke to numerous companies on his quest. Conversations tended to follow the same pattern: feature comparisons, then a line-item breakdown of consultancy costs and infrastructure requirements. The costs mounted before anything had been built.

Then he spoke to Mimica.

"All that was required was to install some software on our service desktops. There was no consultancy required or anything." It seemed almost too good to be true. He agreed to the trial run while simultaneously lining up a competing vendor to evaluate in parallel.

He never got to the parallel evaluation. By the time the competitor was finally ready to kick off, Mimica had already delivered results. The executive readout landed in front of ClearBank's CTO, and the reaction made the choice clear.

"The look on my CTO's face when we went through the executive readout and looked at the data," Thomson said. "It was just like: this is what we've been looking for."

Mimica’s built-in privacy features give users control and confidence

Any tool that records how employees work will raise questions. Thomson knew that going in. His job was to explain the privacy features of Mimica to ensure individuals felt comfortable with the process.

Before recording started with any team, he would sit down with them first. He walked them through the business case, explained why ClearBank was doing this, and addressed the privacy question directly. He also spoke to their managers in advance with a clear message: “this is not a performance management tool. This is a process management tool.”  

User control and privacy are at the foundation of Mimica’s product. Employees are in control of the recorder; they can start and stop it themselves. If someone needs to step away, handle something personal, or talk to HR, they can pause the recording. Nothing gets captured that they don't want captured.

"We're not trying to look at what [individuals are] doing. What we're trying to look at is the processes. That's the data we're trying to get,” he explained in these talks. “Mimica gave us a sample size across a variety of skill sets and tenure.”

The transparency worked. Teams that came in skeptical left reassured. The data that came back showed process patterns, not individual performance. And once people understood that, the dynamic shifted.

Crawl, walk, run and compound the returns

With Mimica in place, ClearBank had something it never had before: accurate, objective data on exactly what its teams were doing, across every system they touched, at scale. The insights came quickly. 

Thomson acted as the ship’s captain to steer the company toward the right improvement process. 

"It's really tempting to automate those big hitting processes first," he said. "But they tend to also be the most complicated processes." Instead, the ClearBank team took a crawl, walk, run approach of starting small to build competency and confidence. 

Thomson explained how small, incremental changes can snowball into large-scale savings. "By delivering smaller items more frequently you get what I call a compound interest effect. Those small 0.1 and 0.2 FTE avoidances can quickly start adding up, and if you're growing at the same rate as ClearBank, they suddenly become 10 to 20 FTE avoidance within a few years.”

Mimica delivers a clear, objective picture of organization-wide work

Thomson's approach has three threads running through it that serve as a roadmap for any team facing similar pressure:

1. Get accurate data on your processes before you touch them. 
2. Start small and let the returns compound rather than swinging for the most complex problem first. 
3. Bring your people along honestly; transparency is was what made the whole program work.

Mimica gave Thomson something he couldn't get any other way: a clear, objective picture of what his teams were actually doing, across every system they used, without anyone having to stand over their shoulders. From that picture, the right priorities became obvious.

For teams still relying on interviews and observation to understand their processes, Thomson's advice is direct: that approach isn't good enough, and there's a better way.

"If you don't know your processes inside out, you need something like task mining to give you the insights. It will change the decisions that you make and your prioritization."

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