Banks & financial services
Overview
These are unprecedented times for the banking and financial services organisations.
The global financial crisis and subsequent economic recession may indeed be only one of the most dramatic manifestations of a paradigm shift that is taking place across the industry.
Even before the headline-grabbing collapse of two Bear Stearns hedge funds in July 2007 and the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, many banks and financial services providers faced severe structural and market pressures:
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MARKET DEVELOPMENTS: the banking and financial services industry has increased in complexity as new participants have entered the market, more organisations have chosen to provide solutions rather than products, and consolidation has taken place amongst suppliers and across platforms. Post-recession, heavier state involvement is likely to complicate this scene even further.
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REGULATION: from the Financial Services Act through to Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, regulation and compliance represented an increasing burden for the financial sector well before the crash of 20081. Post-recession, this process is only intensifying with the advent of new legislation and regulation ranging from Basel III, the Dodd-Frank Act in the US and the ringfencing of UK high street banking operations scheduled in the conclusions of the Vickers report2.
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TECHNOLOGY: legacy systems, new access channels and automation were just some of the complex IT requirements which banks and financial services organisations faced before the recession. Many still face them now – but with less money to spend and more urgent challenges to face.
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COST PRESSURES: pre-recession, organisations in this industry encountered decreasing margins, increasing complexity and unpredictable project costs. Post recession, these cost pressures may be further exacerbated by higher equity ratios leading to slower growth and lower profits.
How should these organisations respond?
Outsourcing has been a feature of the banking and financial services landscape for many years – certainly of IT functions and often of business processes too.
There is a very good reason why:
Banks with a high degree of outsourcing have on average a 5% better cost-income ratio3.
What we may see in the months and years ahead is an increasing use of transformational outsourcing by these institutions.
A viable way forward may include offshoring more strategically significant roles to deliver cost efficiency and ensure compliance through the standardisation of business processes.
To discover more about the ways in which we can help our customers, please click the links below:
We offer banking and financial services organisations the opportunity to remove complexity across a full range of business processes. Customers in this sector already trust us with securities processing, funds administration and investment account administration. In addition, we can also process payroll, learning and development, recruitment, and HR administration as well as providing offshoring services. By unburdening themselves of back office functions like these which support their operation but are essentially peripheral to their vision and mission, we give our customers time and efficiency to focus on what they do best. The result is more flexibility and greater efficiency in the face of formidable challenges.
Customers include: MEAG, Allianz Global Investors
We offer extensive technology capabilities across a variety of industry sectors. In banking and financial services specifically, our solutions include a platform for processing equity exchanges in India together with a proprietary middleware solution that links legacy systems and the SWIFT gateway for over ninety banks across the sub-continent. We deliver high-availability transactional processing systems that support trillions of annual global non-ferrous metal trading. Furthermore the partnership has delivered a ten fold increase in electronic trading volumes and enabled the customer to move into new markets. On the wider stage, our infrastructure team supports customers’ growth with cost effective, scalable and rapidly-deployed solutions. We also design, build and run the software that supports a range of business processing solutions. We embed our intellectual property (IP) to create a solution faster and more cost-effectively than our customers can themselves. We can also provide customers with Total IT Outsourcing (ITO) solutions – a single point of supply for an end-to-end managed service.
Customers include: Dhaka Stock Exchange, London Metal Exchange, UCO Bank, Emirates Bank
We are experts in supporting procurement professionals with services including sourcing, spend management, procure to pay (P2P), system management and software solutions. In this industry, we already provide sourcing and category management across Europe for a French banking group, a source-to-pay service for a bank in the UK and strategic sourcing for a customer in North America.
Customers include: National Australia Group, The Westpac Group
