Financial Services Production Line

Electronic distribution channels make up an integral and indispensable part of the business activities of every financial institution and telecommunication's operator. Clients can no longer imagine communication without Internet banking, a contact centre or self-service portal.

Along with the importance of distribution channels, the extent, complexity and corporate processes that ensure their operation and development have also increased.  The rising requirements for greater flexibility and efficiency can no longer be satisfied by "traditional" processes, which is why a new generation of access and technology is emerging.

Financial Services Production Line is, simply put, a “production line” that produces services and products in electronic distribution channels and supports their whole life cycle from the inception of a business idea to support of operation.

As the manager, are you responsible for the operation of direct channels?

Do you require your IS to readily absorb necessary changes?

The three most pressing areas that do not enable your existing technology to adequately react:

Are you unable to quickly react to changes on the market and to your customers' requests?

FLEXIBILITY

Current business strategies focus on taking advantage of all business opportunities. Small campaigns for a specific group of customers with a specific product are the way to succeed in a world of hard competition on the market and reduced demand. The ability to adapt an offer of products to the customers' use habits is important, e.g. for addressing teenagers who in time will be the most product-demanding customers.

• The time-to-market of classical development isn't enough today
• Four versions within a year do not allow for a flexible reaction to the market
• Procedural complexities of the entire supply increase both the costs and time needed to carry out changes
• Complete regression tests, even after small changes, are extremely expensive

Does the specification and implementation of changes take too long?

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION AND IT

Projects involving distribution channels are very expensive. Development itself, however, is not the primary cause of the high price. The supply's high price is often given above all by the complexity of distribution channels and non-effective business communication and IT. The increased costs are then related to creating specifications, their communication to IT, analysis of the effect, synchronizing with other projects and processes for operating distribution channels. Part of this problem is also the existing concept of applications created as a black box. A business is thus not able to define a change other than by describing the status that it would like to achieve instead of being able to look at what the application actually does and localizing the change very easily and very precisely.

• Project results very often do not satisfy customer expectations
• The classical process of development, as it were, does not allow for verifiable results to be provided regularly.
• The labour involved and costs for maintaining updated documentation are high
• A comprehensive prototyping of applications is missing

Are IT aspects of your projects longer and more expensive than you need and often not at all transparent?

EFFECTIVE ARCHITECTURE

The architecture has a primary influence on the flexibility and effectiveness of the delivery process, operation and development of the given solution. The architecture also has a considerable influence on long-term costs, on the level of so-called business capabilities and business components. This architecture mostly influences costs of extensive changes and of mid-term development.

A growing problem in the classical concept of architecture is the monolithic connection of business functionality and technology. Due to this, every solution must be completely rewritten after the lifespan of the technology, in which it is implemented, is exceeded. With the extent of large companies’ distribution channels at present, these are sums of great proportions. Enormous projects that are difficult to manage can paralyze a company for years and expose it to a large operating risk. Most companies are currently operating the first generation of their distribution channels and are still awaiting this big bang.