Global Banking Organization
Financial Services
Fast growth, much of it through mergers and acquisitions, had left a leading global financial services organization and its US-based banking subsidiary with plenty of headaches – many of them traceable to widely duplicated systems, data and infrastructure. The overlaps led to errors and rework and prevented the firm from properly meeting new business opportunities and banking regulations in an effective manner.
The bank was now tangled up with many different legacy systems that were tightly integrated to one another causing challenges in managing the same client information across platforms. Its reference data processes had become fragmented, complex, redundant, and inefficient. It had become increasingly difficult to access client information through a single global client view. The multiple data sources, the array of technology platforms, and the lack of client data standards led to poor quality of data, which in turn meant a poor client experience, time-consuming and inefficient operations, excessive errors and rework, and inability to support enterprise wide initiatives such as sales redesign and business process transformations.
When the R88 enterprise architecture solutions group was retained to help the bank design and launch a Transformation initiative to reshape the bank, its first step was a thorough analysis of the bank’s systems since the R88 team has deep expertise with current and legacy financial services software solutions. R88 determined that the technology needed to be able to translate the organization’s vision into a model to be applied in how they deliver its products and services. It would also inform the detailed structures required to deliver the vision and influence the financial planning in relation to the phasing of projects.
The architecture design council was also used as a mechanism for analyzing how the organization needed to change and the amount of change required in different areas. This also influenced decisions made around investment required in the various areas with their corresponding ROI.
R88’s enterprise architecture consulting involved designing solutions based on the business Target Operating Model that would align different applications then maintain and distribute key client data in one unified system of record. Consolidation meant that data sources would be grouped and stored at a centralized location for greater reliability and maintainability. The specific goals for this phase included providing a new front end for capture of client information, performing data cleansing and validation, and ensuring that there would be no impact on downstream applications since the legacy systems would be running in parallel to provide client operational data.
Some of the specific goals: to limit multiple legacy systems from distributing data to downstream applications and to ensure that downstream applications began receiving client data from the subscription services of the new distribution platforms.
Some of the ongoing R88 activities in support of this major transformation were the ability to check ‘vertical consistency’ as detail was developed and implemented to ensure that all ground-level implementations are correctly aligned to the operating model – ensuring optimum contribution to the organization’s goals, vitality and robustness.
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