Despite the advances of information technology into business, many sectors still remain overly reliant on manual and paper-based processes. By embracing technology and automation, a company can use first mover advantage to become more competitive, reduce its own overheads and become more attractive to do business with – all to the benefit of the bottom line.

Situation

IFG Group plc is a financial services provider headquartered in Dublin with overseas operations in the UK, Isle of Man, Jersey, Cyprus and Switzerland.It provides independent financial advisory services in Ireland and the UK, mortgage and title insurance in Ireland and international and corporate trustee services. In 2007, newly appointed CEO of IFG Ireland, Gary Owens, put in place a strategy to position IFG as the lowest-cost mortgage distribution provider in Ireland, after a business strategy review found that brokers were leaving the IFG network. This exit of brokers, the study found, was due largely to inefficient business processes operating within the company that made IFG too expensive to do business with.

Owens decided that the way to reduce these costs and thus win back the customers was to place information technology was to be at the heart of IFG's new strategy. The intent was to deliver cost efficiencies through the introduction of a fully automated case management system deployed internally within the company and outwards to its network of brokers.

"The previous backoffice processes had been extremely manual, very labour-intensive and had limited automation," says IFG Ireland's project manager, Alan Kelly. "Technology in the past," he points out, "was not considered as a strategic enabler for IFG. We had never spent the money or concentrated on it. The business strategy review highlighted that this lack of focus on IT was significantly affecting the profitability of the business. The costs associated with the manual processes were too high and while this was not a fatal issue when things were good now in these more difficult times it was resulting in the company's customers, the brokers, moving to competitor companies."

“The data has to go in right the first time so you don’t have any servicing costs to the business. I call that real self service functionality and I believe strongly it helps your cost of doing business in financial services reduce significantly. In financial terms, the cost of us processing business was 38 per cent, it’s now 16 per cent and it’s heading for 10 per cent.” Gary Owens CEO, IFG Mortgages “By any standards, we believe that the turnaround time we achieved of four months after completion of the specification to get to the initial production release into commercial use was an outstanding achievement, given the scale of the functionality delivered and the scope of the technical challenges involved.” Ambrose Curry Sales Director, Saascom

Solution

IFG management decided it could deliver the 'lowest cost' strategic objective by deploying a fully automated web-based case management system.It felt that costs would be significantly reduced if this system provided the various user groups – from mortgage brokers, lenders, IFG salespeople, internal operations and administration personnel – with self-service functions to allow them to do their jobs more effectively. The solution would have to be accessible through a web browser, saving third parties from having to install specialist software to work with the IFG system. In addition, IFG anticipated that by making the information easily available, it could reduce the number of calls coming into the business from brokers wishing to check on the progress of cases. Another central requirement of the system was that it delivered on the concept of a single view of any transaction for each stakeholder – all information pertaining to a customer's case visible on one screen. The processing of mortgage applications into IFG's backend systems would need to be completely automated as incomplete documents frequently cause delays in processing mortgage applications. IFG reasoned that by building knowledge into the system it could obtain all of the necessary information from brokers consistently the first time, eliminating the need for rework and thus facilitating the delivery of a much faster service. Integrating the backend processing systems with a front-end sales and CRM tool, as well as an integrated mortgage calculator, would also drastically lower the costs of doing business.

The company evaluated several off-the-shelf products but none matched its requirements so it opted for the development and modification route and chose the 'ONE' financial services case management system from Dublin-based Saascom Limited. A team from IFG and Saascom was formed to manage the project and before a line of code was written, they focused on understanding the business and documenting the business processes. "This took about four weeks to complete," says Ambrose Curry, sales director with Saascom. "Then we spent the next eight weeks creating a specification for the development team which would embed the processes into the ONE system. So, in total, 12 weeks were consumed creating the functional spec and prototype." Development started thereafter with a team of six Saascom developers and a further team of eight business people and developers from IFG working together to create the applications. Owens comments: "We were looking at extremely tight deadlines. We were setting the fastest deadlines I've ever seen in terms of this scale of project in financial services." The technology infrastructure was designed and delivered using Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft .NET 3.5 that provided scalability, security, was centrally hosted and based on web technology. Phase one of the project, to deliver the new mortgage CRM & sales tools processes, was completed in May 2008. The broker community responded extremely positively to the new system when it was deployed shortly thereafter. "By any standards, we believe that the turnaround time we achieved of four months after completion of the specification to get to the initial production release into commercial use was an outstanding achievement, given the scale of the functionality delivered and the scope of the technical challenges involved," says Curry. The second phase which included online application submission and back office workflow was completed in August 2008.  The third phase, focused on online fact finding and personal-line products, was concluded in December 2008. Further product processes are scheduled for delivery at regular intervals over the next 12 months. According to Kelly, other financial providers look on in envy at what IFG has achieved in such a short space of time. "The minimum other developers were telling us was 12 months which probably realistically meant 18 so it was certainly quicker to develop than the competition."

"Time to market was a critical success factor for IFG. Developer and team productivity are key value propositions of .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, and Saascom had the agility to respond quickly to IFG's requirements and deliver a secure, scalable and reliable hosted solution to a very exacting timeline," says Ronan Geraghty of the developer and platform group at Microsoft Ireland. Curry attributes this speed to the flexibility and adaptability of the Microsoft technology. "Visual Studio 2008 supports rapid code development, the web services approach of the Microsoft .NET framework is ideal for delivering major web-based integrated systems and the power of the Microsoft SQL database supports the scalability, security and robustness of large-scale application delivery," he says. Kelly believes the project's success was founded on not prioritising technology to the detriment of the business it was serving. "Saascom took on board our needs rather than just delivering a system," he says.

Benefits

Lower operating costs
IFG has reduced its operating costs by 60 per cent through more efficient work processes. As Owens describes it, "there are three elements to processing a mortgage for a customer: one is the broker, the second a packager such as IFG and the third a manufacturer – the bank. You need a system that's web-based, that's a seamless link between the three," he says. "The data has to go in right the first time so you don't have any servicing costs to the business. I call that real self service functionality and I believe strongly it helps your cost of doing business in financial services reduce significantly. In financial terms, the cost of us processing business was 38 per cent, it's now 16 per cent and it's heading for 10 per cent."

Expanding the company's reach to partners
Introducing web-based technology has been a major factor in recruiting brokers back to working with IFG. Since ONE was put in place, there has been a 200 per cent increase in the size of the broker network. According to Kelly, the technology has been a key recruitment tool for new brokers. "We've pretty much doubled the size of our network in the past six months on the basis of having an extremely strong system. The reaction to it has been excellent," he says. Colm Quinn, of Independent Brokerage on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin, adds: "The One System has allowed me to greatly reduce my overheads."

Faster turnaround times for customer applications
IFG has reduced the time to process customer applications by 66 per cent thanks to the improved control of task management offered by the ONE system. There is no need to re-enter data which was the case with the manual process. "On an individual basis, we're processing a third more business than we would have and our intention is to get that up to about 50 per cent, in terms of cases processed per person," says Kelly.

Reduced telephone bills
Now that brokers can quickly access all case information on the ONE system over the web, the number of query phone calls to IFG has dropped by 50pc. This is exactly what IFG wanted as part of its low-cost strategy. "The fewer calls we have, the more efficient we can become, and the more efficient we can become, the more cases we can process," says Kelly.

The improved processes behind the ONE system have led to faster approval of mortgage applications by the banks – benefiting IFG's broker network and, ultimately, their customers. "We get all our responses back from the lenders' underwriters now in real time. They log in to our system and we get their decision instantly," says Kelly. "It has completely transformed our service level agreements and turnaround times for getting those approvals in principle because it's online and in real time. Everything happens instantly." Minimal retraining needed
By being based on Microsoft technology, the look and feel of the system was familiar to many users, which reduced the time needed to train them. "The fact the system looked modern and quite similar to other Microsoft Office products that they would have used was a big bonus," says Kelly. "We got a lot of positive feedback saying that the navigation around the system was much easier than if people were starting on something that was totally alien to them.

Summary

The ONE system has delivered on its promise to reduce costs and improve efficiencies at IFG. "By introducing the system, we've got our cost base down dramatically and effectively the strategy now is, we've got a low cost base so the more volume we can get into that business, the costs only rise very incrementally and hence we can run a more profitable business. The core of doing that is having the right technology and the right platforms," says Kelly. The company has completely re-engineered its business through IT – without the slow progress often associated with major technology projects. "It's night and day in terms of what we used to do versus what we do now. There's no comparison. It's like comparing a Morris Minor and a brand new Porsche. And it's had a dramatic effect on the business, too," adds Kelly. Gary Owens is clearly happy with the results. "The biggest problem in financial services is the processes and paper that are used to sell and administer financial products. The holy grail is self service and we're one of the first to achieve that," he declares.

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© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2008