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An Infosys survey concludes that companies spend up to 75% of their IT budgets on maintaining and running existing systems and infrastructure. In addition, experts estimate the annual cost of owning/ managing software applications to be as much as four times the cost of the initial purchase. Spreadsheets have been cost effective, but at the expense of efficiency. This has prompted treasurers to look for customized Treasury Management Systems (TMSs). For companies that want TMSs in place without a significant impact on IT expenditure, moving to Cloud is an optimal option. Experts explore business drivers of moving to Cloud, while detailing the risks and ways of mitigating them.
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Published with the permission of HSBC
Financial institutions (FIs) face IT challenges spanning regulatory compliance, technology platforms and management. They address these challenges by adopting...
Agile development methodologies such as Scrum, feature-driven development (FDD), Agile modeling, lean development, Extreme Programming (XP), and Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF). Discover how FIs can use their global workforce to implement the Global Agile development methodology.
The present-day clearing and settlement takes about three days in the US and two days in India. These SLAs are fixed for business and technology reasons. However the benefits are not the same for...
all the parties due to the trade-off between time-to-market and cost. The chapter in this book (page 40) presents the future-state view of the trade and settlement process, where the SLA is reduced to the same day – by adopting real-time enterprise concepts.
Nearly 75% of all cross-sell opportunities occur within the first 90 days of a customer engaging with your institution. A robust onboarding approach—including...
initial enrollment through relevant data collection, constant customer engagement and predefined onboarding metrics—can go a long way in enabling your financial institution to take control of the entire process. This way you can capitalize on subsequent cross-sell and up-sell activities.
TARGET2-Securities (T2S) intends to create a pan-European settlement engine that will provide centralized delivery versus payment (DVP) in European central bank...
funds. This is expected to reduce the cost of settlements, create a unified market, increase competition, and foster greater harmonization. In this paper, we take a close look at T2S – the infrastructure challenges to overcome, the benefits, and regulatory implications.
Social media has brought life and technology together in a way that there's no going back from. Financial institutions can no longer bank on the 'wait and see' approach...
to decide where they stand in the cyber world. The need of the hour is an aggressive and well-planned social media strategy — one that adapts to clients and achieves its objectives by 'listening' to the world in a way that only social media monitoring can.
Augmented reality has brought to life the high-tech futuristic shopping mall in the movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character is confronted with digital signs...
that call out his name when he passes them. Augmented reality, in simple terms, is the use of diverse technology to enhance and improve our view of the real world. In financial services, the time is ripe to leverage these technologies to deliver cutting-edge solutions to customers.
A banking website is not simply a channel for disseminating product information. It has evolved significantly and now has the capacity to source, retain, and furthermore, educate...
mortgage borrowers. An ideal banking application must provide a favorable online customer experience. It needs to respond to the borrower’s thoughts and behavior rather than merely execute pre-programmed functions. The good news is that Web 3.0 can help you achieve this state.
Financial payments have seen a new wave of improvements with the emergence of e-payments or alternate payment methods (APMs). While organizations are aware...
of APM risks, they also realize how these methods have significantly contributed to their business growth. The way forward lies in risk mitigation – using effective countermeasures that comprise integrated enterprise-wide strategies around governance, risk and compliance.
The recent emergence of technologies designed to address ‘big data’ has ensured that today, your bank can have the capability to process huge volumes of unstructured...
data, including email, SMS, and customer feedback. To remain competitive and create tangible value for your customers, your bank requires an integrated data analytics solution that can process and analyze this unstructured data to make effective, customer-focused decisions.
The Australian superannuation industry is witnessing a slew of regulatory changes. In addition, changes in the client’s profile and preferences are transforming the business and operating landscape. Together, these changes...
are providing an unprecedented opportunity to retirement administrators, funds and other service providers. Understanding these changes, their implications on operations and processes, as well as the subsequent implementation from an IT perspective will enable participants to win in the competitive retirement space.
Today, social media is becoming a popular way of interacting with customers while at the same time improving the firm’s brand image. Wealth managers have dabbled with social media for a couple...
of years but have not been very successful at leveraging it. While clear regulatory guidelines are still not in place and technology issues still exist, wealth managers that can proactively address potential issues with regards to social media will not only get a head start, but also emerge winners in the long term.
This paper delves into the current state of buy side order management systems (OMS), the key technical changes that have pervaded them, the emerging business needs, as well as industry trends that can...
lead them forward. Finally, this paper provides a list of key evaluation criteria to help clients choose an OMS and explores the areas that OMS vendors need to address in their quest for developing an all-round product offering.
The industry is witnessing a transformation in the way customers bank. Digital technologies are changing the way customers interact with each other and with their banks. As customers are exposed...
to newer channels of interaction and demand greater personalization, it is imperative that banks focus on delivering a seamless customer experience across multiple touchpoints. Are you ready to put your eggs into one digital channel basket?
Achieving good multi-channel UX is not rocket science. It just requires banks to spend more time understanding the opportunities afforded by good UX rather than the difficulties. As connectivity becomes ubiquitous and Internet...
interfaces multiply, the traditional service and support ecosystems that created, maintained, and enhanced the functionalities available on the Internet are undergoing a sea change. Find out how much multi-channel delivery matters to an enterprise.
Change is the new constant. Understanding the customer is the new imperative. In our digitally connected dynamic world, customers learn, communicate, and shop with technology. Easy access...
to abundant information, web connectivity, and mobile devices, which are key characteristics of the digital age, may have a negative impact and weaken customer loyalty. Where do banks stand in this changing landscape?
Financial services have a very subliminal customer experience dimension. Products are mostly virtual. Customer correspondence is generally in the form of verbose documents. Self-service opportunities are...
few and customer service turnaround time is high. All due to the inherent complexity of financial products and services. But these limitations in customer experience can be overcome, with what is now being touted as 'immersive correspondence'.
Money has gone digital – with the advent of online banking, cards, and near field communication (NFC) devices. And analytics is all set to take understanding of customer needs to...
the next level. It will enhance the ability of institutions to develop and sell products that meet niche requirements. Analytics is likely to evolve from merely identifying relationships to identifying trends. Is digital transformation the 'enabler' (cause) or the 'enabled' (effect)?
It's now or never for self-service banking. In the last decade, banks have successfully overseen the migration of their customers to self-service banking, with an emphasis on cost reduction. So that self-service banking makes...
money and not be considered as a given, banks must energize their self-service channels, and in the process look beyond the near horizon of cost reduction for exploring opportunities to make money from self-service.
Hackers are a force to reckon with, and for banks, a challenge they need to overcome. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO’s ode to 'the hacker way', has brought hackers to the mainstream. The dictum that...
'there is always scope for improvement' applies aptly to hackers. The society of hackers has grown exponentially, not just in size but in the variety of attack methods they are armed with today. To the hacker, the tougher the challenge, the greater the success.
In a world where innovation and technology are buzz words, security concerns are a given. Biometrics help you identify the challenge and provide a solution as well. It adds the human element to your...
virtual business communication. It can be used across all digital channels − online, mobile, social − and can become a new norm for the industry as a whole. How can biometrics help financial services institutions (FSIs) serve their customers better? Find out.
The cards and payments industry is undergoing a digital transformation with the introduction of newer payment methods like EMV (Europay, MasterCard and VISA) chips, PIN cards and mobile wallets, making...
the industry more secure.The biggest challenge for the payments industry is to keep the magnitude of frauds down and not compromise convenience for customers. Here's how the cards and payments industry is using digital transformation to increase security.
Financial institutions have seen success in their social media initiatives in terms of engaging customers, resolving customer problems, marketing, and product research. However, they rely...
on traditional methods to assess a customer's credibility while determining credit limits or loan amounts. But they’re now introducing social media in their IT landscape. The focus is to leverage social media to help reduce risk. Is social media the answer to checking fraud?
In an attempt to be the banking partner for every occasion, banks have been embracing technology with a vengeance. Ironically, in this process, the bank's personal touch with the consumer has...
withered. Digital banking is today’s great enabler and deliverer. Many customers are missing the warmth. This article explores how we can give a smiling face and warm feel to digital banking, away from the intellectual and cold beauty it now is.
Digital technologies have had a significant impact on customers. Going mobile is the mantra, but how do you set about synchronizing your terabytes of data to work across...
devices? What are the various security options available? How can data consistency be maintained throughout? And what about a consistent user experience? Here are some opportunities and potential challenges a financial institution may face when going mobile.
Wall post. Comment thread. Tweet. Newsfeed. 'Like'. Welcome to the world of social banking. If you're not into social banking, you're probably not in the reckoning at all. Social banking is no...
more an infant crying to make its presence felt in a world full of serious grown-ups. Your brand identity, popularity, and reach of your products are now dependent on it. It’s time to make the shift. Are you ready to go social?
The amount of available customer information is increasing at near-exponential rates. Our Integrated Customer Intelligence Framework can help you make sense of it and focus your analysis on the most valuable bits (no pun intended).
The Dodd-Frank Act, European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), and other new regulations will lead to major changes in settlement, collateralization, and reporting of over-the-counter...
(OTC) derivative trades. The higher amount of collateral held against OTC derivative trades and the greater operational complexity for the back office will result in increased cost of collateralization for trading institutions.
What concerns capital market firms today is not the increase in data, but the volume of overall unstructured data. Capital market firms invest heavily in Big Data technologies despite the implementation...
costs involved. This article discusses the key transformations that capital market firms are undergoing to handle big data, drivers for use of big data technology in capital markets and relevant use cases.
Consumer Internet banking has evolved from helping customers meet their basic banking needs to meeting more sophisticated requirements like personal...
financial management. Today, Internet banking is an important revenue builder and competitive differentiator for banks. However, despite its all-too-obvious advantages, many banks are unable to realize the full potential of the Internet banking channel.
The bank branch needs to stay relevant and reiterate itself as the preferred mode of banking. Read how the bank branch is transforming by integrating technology and innovation, and with other banking channels.
This paper discusses the basic process and system architecture required to combat the Basel n+1 syndrome, and how technology can be creatively leveraged for active risk management.
Globalizing existing applications is a key strategy for enterprises looking to engage customers, vendors, and other business stakeholders across heterogeneous...
cultures and geographies. This white paper suggests automating the process of globalizing existing applications by reducing manual intervention, thus crunching time-to-market, maintaining current quality standards, and improving productivity.
Adopting the SPICE (Social, Personal, and Interactive to enable an enhanced Customer Experience) framework will help banks engage customers and understand their preferences better, improve marketing...
opportunities around new products and services, and enhance their brand image, while driving up customer services.
The Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) proposed in Fall 2009 is expected to bring a paradigm shift in the regulatory environment of financial institutions. While the act...
will complete two years in July 2012, it's still evolving, and it remains to be seen how the act will ultimately pan out. This paper covers DFA’s context, proposed changes, and its impact on the financial services industry from both business and IT perspectives.
Basel III aim to strengthen individual financial institutions as well as the overall financial system by eliminating the weaknesses in Basel II guidelines, which were...
revealed during the financial crisis. This white paper covers various Basel III guidelines, and describes why and how these will impact different areas of IT infrastructure and systems.
As a response to the banking fiascos that have mushroomed across the globe, a slew of regulations that aim towards a global recovery have been...
brought in. In this paper, we examine the need for a comprehensive data governance solution, establish strategic measures towards building it, and highlight how it creates a competitive edge for the firm.
Smarter banks have started using video technology to connect the customer with the right expert and provide quick and personalized service. Many banks are...
still in the nascent stage of embracing video technology. Even so, they cannot ignore the power of video technology in providing customers better access to more services, while bringing more human touch into digital banking. Importantly, compared to telephone banking, there is a high cross-sell rate for video banking.
Recent years have not been kind to banks, and the unstable economic climate didn’t help the cause either. However, there are some exciting developments taking place within the industry, which will help rehabilitate the damaged institutions of today into tomorrow’s banks.
Banks today are moving back to basics, shifting their attention from complex product offerings to developing greater connect and intimacy with customers. This change is a result of factors like...
increased regulatory pressure and customer expectations, with a growing trust deficit in the bank-customer relationship. But this change is also a massive transformation for most banks as their processes and strategy have ignored customer-centricity for a long time.
This paper focuses on the key requirements of the Basel III compliance framework, provides recommendations for business processes, and outlines solutions to meet compliance...
requirements. It highlights key issues uncovered during the financial crisis, delves deeper into the impact of the new regulations on data and technology systems, and examines the challenges firms face in re-engineering their data and IT systems
The recent financial crisis - along with the freezing of the credit markets and increased volatility - has resulted in higher volumes of collateralized loans as well as the introduction of new security...
classes as collateral. It has also prompted the need for more robust and flexible risk management and valuation systems. Read this thought paper for a deep-dive into the transformation in the collateral management ecosystem.
Despite growth, the global wealth management (WM) industry is gripped by numerous challenges. WM firms must make large-scale changes to many aspects of their business in order to overcome...
these challenges, capitalize on opportunities and be more successful. This thought paper discusses the key challenges that WM firms face and provides solutions to overcome them.
In mergers and acquisitions (M&A), it is important to incorporate a comprehensive reconciliation process as an integral part of data migration. The reconciliation...
process itself is complex and fraught with challenges. This white paper recommends an automated, configurable and comprehensive reconciliation approach with an integrated exception management system that addresses these reconciliation challenges and ensures accurate, fast and cost-effective data migration.
While there is a strong treasury focus on accounts receivable (A/R) to help meet the goal of effective cash management, a similar focus is needed on accounts payable (A/P). Several internal and external challenges must be dealt with to make...
the process more efficient, which can be addressed using various A/P management strategies. This article examines how the A/P process can be made more effective by building a strategic partnership among vendors, banks and corporates.
Published with the permission of HSBC
The power of social media will have a significant impact on the way Financial Services conduct business. From connecting directly with end customers, or engaging with employees, to collaborating with partners, social media...
provides a significant value proposition that companies ignore at their peril. As stakeholders increasingly adopt social technologies, the potential of social media can help companies grow customer loyalty, accelerate growth, and unleash their potential. This paper provides insight into how social media technologies can be exploited effectively by financial services enterprises to build their brand, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction.
Testing the merger of two banks can be a challenging proposition for Quality Assurance (QA) teams. The impact, scale and complexity of the merger, all add to the challenge. A comprehensive test strategy...
that addresses the fundamental requirements of mergers is critical to the success of such programs. There are certain aspects of testing which need to be foremost in priority while testing such programs. This point of view identifies these key aspects and describes how a comprehensive test strategy for successfully handling such test programs needs to include them.
Given the current uncertain economic environment, companies are holding more cash today to brace for the prolonged credit crisis at hand. Currently, all companies...
in the S&P 500 stock index have increased their cash across the board by 1.5% year on year. All this has made treasury management even more challenging. Today, treasury managers, should test drive a chosen solution to ensure that the costs involved are worth the efforts and in sync with the future plans of the organization. This white paper focuses on some of the best practices of treasury management receivables and disbursement functions that can help a treasurer handle the challenges posed by the economy.
The current economic environment compels organizations to review their cost structures. According to Infosys' experts, a review of all IT and Operations/BPO spend, and prioritization of the right cost reduction areas can...
reduce costs by up to 30-40%. Our experts propose an end-to-end approach to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership. It involves restructuring and reducing the IT spend to decrease the cost of running the legacy environment, and increasing the discretionary spending for strategic initiatives to improve competitiveness.
As cost-cutting is becoming an imperative to combat the global economic slowdown, companies are also concentrating on achieving more benefits from sourcing through options such as the Global Delivery Model. In addition to...
this, companies are also looking at increasing offshore work. Global Finance magazine published our experts' survey-backed view of the emerging IT sourcing trends including key drivers, focus areas, and challenges.
This article has been reproduced with the permission of Global Finance magazine.
The Options Symbology Initiative (OSI) to be implemented in 2009 will impact front-to-back processing between broker-dealers. It will require changes in a financial firm's internal systems as well as its interface with external entities. In this paper,...
Infosys' experts discuss the challenges in complying with OSI. They recommend best practices such as impact analysis, solution implementation and testing to ensure consistency and quality at a low cost.
This paper was originally published in Waters, March 2008.
The wealth management industry is one of the most dynamic industries today. Due to the Internet, investors have unlimited access to investment information and varied choices. As a result, individual investors - especially...
high net worth investors - are behaving like institutional investors and expect sophisticated services such as portfolio risk management, dynamic asset allocation and objective investment advice.
Wealth management firms need to address the business-critical issues that are hampering them from providing better service and increasing assets under management. The key challenges in 2007 include - increasing client demands, inability to aggregate product and other data, poor technology implementation and adoption, competing for and closing new clients retaining existing clients and increasing compliance and regulatory requirements. This white paper explores the best practices and solutions available to turn these challenges into opportunities.
In this era of rising interest rates, falling mortgage volumes, rapidly changing demographic profiles and tightening regulations, players in the mortgage industry are compelled to 'think outside the box' and use non-traditional...
responses to stay competitive. Mortgage marketing is one such area, which, in our opinion, is underutilized. This paper attempts to identify the trends that play a key role in enhancing the effectiveness of mortgage marketing.
RegNMS and MiFID aim to protect investors by ensuring best price on every execution. However, this is easier said than done and will have significant impact on buy-side (investment firms) and sell-side (brokerages), besides...
market infrastructure participants such as Exchanges, Electronically Connected Networks (ECNs) and others. Infosys offers a preview of some solutions that we feel will help companies realize a bigger bang for their RegNMS/ MiFID compliance buck.
The key challenge for a large firm today is achieving centralized corporate actions market data processing, which involves capturing and certifying corporate actions centrally and distributing the same golden copy...
information to the data consuming applications. This paper discusses approaches and best practices to put in place a firm wide Corporate Actions consolidation project.
This paper was originally published on www.gtnews.com
Single Sign-On (SSO) is considered critical for the Financial Services industry which is plagued by security breaches, unauthorized access incidents, phishing and identity thefts. Conventionally available systems, while...
tending to be expensive, also pose security issues. Linux-based SSO offers benefits that enhance security, reduce costs. It also offers better user experiences and increase productivity.
Credible internal loss history databases are essential to implement advanced risk analysis and measurement techniques. Basel-defined requirements for loss history are stringent - three years (ideally five) of operational loss history....
This data, however, is hard to come by in most banks and financial institutions, especially for some business lines-risk category combinations. Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) seemingly provide an elegant solution to this problem, combining qualitative and quantitative data for loss estimates. This paper provides a reference implementation of a BBN with an application to Corporate Action processing.
Although financial services organizations have long adopted technology to enhance business efficiency, a piecemeal approach to IT planning and management has led to poor business-IT alignment and redundant applications....
Managing IT applications as a portfolio can significantly enhance business-IT fit. It allows IT-related strategic and operational decisions to be based on risks, resource constraints and operational goals, instead of traditional IT performance metrics.
Traditional functional testing, which precedes application deployment, focuses on testing the main system and ignores critical interconnected systems - a huge risk from the Financial Services and Securities industry perspective....
An automated testing system can test all related systems and the entire application logic, while optimizing test cases for rigorous application testing.
Next-generation intelligent enterprise systems learn and adapt, comprehending new money laundering schemes as they arise. These smart solutions should be strongly considered as part of all strategic AML(anti money laundering) plans.
Design a single customer view where you can see all of a customer's information and related data at one time. The capacity to take an all-encompassing view of the customer and relevant factors is critical, since the most efficient way to ...
uncover a money laundering scheme is having the ability to access and correlate a range of data about the client, the client's associates and transactions.
Corporate customers have been voicing their dissatisfaction with the services and value they receive from banks in the area of Payments. This has been a strong driver of change
in the Payments industry. However, European banks...
seem to be focusing on SEPA - and we believe they run the risk of losing customers in the long run. Worse, they may not be able to sustain even the existing levels of revenues from the Payments area.