Featured White Paper
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
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.
The rapid spread of IT systems in the aftermath of the dotcom era has led to server sprawl. Applications run in silos and most servers are underutilized. Companies are quickly realizing that this means sub-optimal RoI....
They are also seeing the benefits of collaboration and sharing not just at the data level but also at the infrastructure layer - something that is made feasible through Grid Computing.
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.