Featured White Paper
While a majority of banks struggle to cope up during the financial crisis, the smarter ones are set to usher in New Age Banking. It will be driven by customers and requires banks to focus on creating value for customers, run an optimized business and evolve a business model to emerge stronger when the global economy begins recovery. Our article discusses five customer imperatives that will drive New Age Banking, and the way forward for banks to emerge as winners.
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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 
Mutual Fund Musts
Seven critical compliance imperatives have a major impact on the mutual funds industry. How can mutual fund companies leverage technology to enhance regulatory compliance and increase investor confidence?...
Atul Seth, Senior Associate, Infosys Technologies, writes in Wall Street & Technology about how technology can help mutual fund companies manage their compliance initiatives.
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.