Financial Services

Financial Service organizations face a number of challenges, including the need to consolidate acquired systems and data, the need to provide superior customer services across multiple products and channels and the need to meet an increasingly complex web of compliance, privacy and regulatory needs. Whether your organization offers financial services, banking, capital markets or insurance solutions, the efficiency with which you do business can be dramatically increased by breaking down the barriers between systems and applications. The key to an agile infrastructure is a connected network of support systems, both across the organization and across its partners. Incompatible IT systems necessitate manual interventions across system boundaries, resulting in redundancy and errors. It is through removal of such barriers that information can be made available to those that need it, when they need it, both within the organization and out to subsidiaries and partners.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to integrating IT resources that can enable you to leverage existing assets, while at the same time building an infrastructure that can respond to new and emerging business challenges and deliver new dynamic applications in a highly flexible manner. The SOA approach can help free application functionality from its underlying architecture, and make existing and new services available for consumption over the network.

Microsoft has a comprehensive SOA offering that:

• Provides developers, architects and IT professionals with the tools, technologies, framework and guidance for building and maintaining SOA solutions
• Provides business users with personal productivity software that can help your organization increase productivity, lower costs and promote organizational agility by streamlining and optimizing business processes

Increased competition among banking, brokering and insurance companies necessitates greater attention to customer demands for improved pricing and integrated service channels. At the same time, there is increased pressure to meet regulatory requirements without sacrificing other business initiatives, particularly those that contribute to corporate growth.

Examining how effectively organizational goals are supported by your systems and processes can reduce the risk of increased communication errors by eliminating highly fragmented processes that require multiple handoffs.

• Does your organization have legacy systems that neither interoperate nor connect as the result of a merger or acquisition?
• Do you have processes that duplicate existing legacy processes?
• Are your internal line of business applications integrated with your external transaction or customer service systems?

Improving processes across organizational and departmental boundaries can contribute enormously to organizational efficiency.

• Banking functions such as bank drafts and loan applications often cross multiple departments and in some cases multiple organizations, making it difficult to build a holistic view of the process
• International broker trades, in which it is critical to know whether the trade took place and whether it was according to customer specifications, can go awry at any number of places in the process
• Localizing and rectifying problems—rapidly—is extremely difficult to do without both a holistic view of the process, and knowledge of what's happening in the process at each step

Business process management (BPM) can help financial services organizations obtain the needed visibility into their business processes.