This paper provides insights into the topic of workflow optimization and seeks to answer the question: what optimization techniques prove to be effective in optimizing workflows specific to financial institutions? This work includes an overview of the workflow concept and workflow types, describes the use of workflows at financial institutions and provides information about various workflow optimization methods. In order to gather and analyze quantitative data about the opinion of finance/IT industry professionals, a survey was conducted within two international financial institutions. To observe the efficiency of the described optimization methods, some of the methods were implemented practically and a case study was conducted to measure the impact of the optimization on the workflow execution time.