Financial services companies have the challenge of needing to reduce IT spending while at the same time relentlessly automating business processes to become more efficient. In many firms, this results in Java developers struggling with coding demands and large application backlogs while project costs creep higher and time-to-market grows longer. The need to continuously evolve service-oriented applications to keep them current with fast-changing business and regulatory processes greatly compounds the problem.
Additionally, cascading maintenance cycles overwhelm IT staff, resulting in out-of-date systems that expose companies to loss. To make matters worse, playing perpetual catch-up is costly, with annual application maintenance costs averaging 15-30 percent of initial development budgets. Versata is uniquely qualified to help solve these business problems.
Versata has a long and successful history of helping financial services organizations get new products to market fast with systems tailored to fulfill precise business requirements. Today, many of the top international financial services companies use Versata solutions. Our rapidly-adaptable solutions help financial services companies stay ahead in this fiercely competitive and highly regulated market by enabling continuous adaptation to business and regulatory change.
Data Management for Financial Services
A key issue affecting many financial services companies is how to create and maintain consistent versions of data throughout the organization. Organizations routinely maintain vast quantities of data including customer, product, pricing and other common information that exists across different enterprise systems and databases. Inconsistencies, errors and omissions in this common data - or "master data" - residing in different data stores, hinder the value of integrated enterprise applications and creates some of the most costly problems facing your business. Operational loss, missed cross- and up-selling opportunities, customer frustration and churn, and failed regulatory compliance all result from bad master data.
Implementing changes in how master data is created, updated and deleted, so that it complies with new regulatory requirements, is equally problematic. With different versions of data manipulation logic distributed around the enterprise, managing and adapting it could take months for every incremental change. Versata provides the industry's most effective solution to these problems.
Using Business Rules for Exception Management Solutions
Competition, market swings, new regulatory guidelines and volatile equity data all drive constant change in the financial services industry. Unexpected changes register in your IT systems as "exceptions," and the success of your firm largely depends on correctly classifying them. When you encounter an exception, is it just a random error in need of correction, or is it a significant deviation in behavior? Could it be a new behavior of an index component or index upon which a trading strategy might be based? Failure to do intelligent exception management has dire consequences for financial services firms in both cases. Random errors in business data are among the most costly problems facing financial services organizations. Failing to automatically identify and correct them leads to operational loss, missed revenue opportunities, customer frustration and churn, and slow and costly manual error checking which represents the largest obstacle to meeting STP and T+1 requirements.
Significant exceptions, or deviations, also provide the highly valuable basis of sophisticated trading strategies in which firms spot and monetize price anomalies and global macro trends. Failing to correctly identify these valuable exceptions can result in unrealized trading gains and uncompetitive returns. Separating meaningful exceptions from random ones and automating the appropriate workflow processes is, unfortunately, extremely difficult. Effective exception management means acquiring a deluge of continuously changing information, sifting it, processing it, and triggering both automated and manual business processes that are custom tailored to your business. Versata's exception management solution is the financial services industry's most advanced answer to this complex problem.
Increase your Customer Knowledge through
"Know Your Customer" (KYC) Solutions
Financial institutions must be able to provide personalized service and highly customized offerings. To do this, you need consistent customer information at all customer touch points including online services, phone centers, and self-service offerings. In addition, firms are required to ensure that customers are not acting on behalf of money launderers or other criminals. Having sufficient information about customers is required to meet the strict regulations passed after September 11 and is a cornerstone requirement for a "Know Your Customer" solution. Whether required for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, anti-money laundering regulation, or for improved customer service for personalized banking, Versata business rules will help you develop applications that work for your company. Versata KYC solutions:
- Make it easy to track existing automated, manual and compliance information and provide a single entry point
- Support account creation and compliance checking logic needed for regulatory compliance
- Provide a simple user interface to generate the pages needed to create a customized and personalized user experience
- Provide a comprehensive audit trail and closed feedback loop for comprehensive total quality management (TQM) programs
Select Versata Customer Solutions in Financial Services:
Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburg
AHP system
The AHP system is a web-based enterprise application that automates the process of applying for funds at the Federal Home Loan Bank under the federally created Affordable Housing Program. The system cuts application processing time from weeks to days, streamlines record keeping and monitoring, and provides for more efficient distribution of grants. The Federal Home Loan Bank built the AHP system and brought it to market rapidly with the Versata Logic Suite - a new choice in software for financial services IT organizations unsatisfied with the trade-offs of the "buy versus build" debate. Like a packaged application, the Versata Logic Suite's execution framework, the Versata Logic Server, provided the entire application infrastructure for the system so the bank's developers didn't have to. Like a custom solution, the bank got complete control over the system specification, functionality, and upgrade schedule-but with an important advantage. Using easy-to-understand Versata business rules, developers rapidly configured exactly the functionality required to meet their unique business requirements on top of Versata's infrastructure foundation in weeks. The Federal Home Loan Bank IT shop brought the AHP system to market in 50 percent of the time estimated for procedural coding by J2EE developers. Versata continuous adaptability enables the bank to incorporate frequently changing business and regulatory requirements in hours.
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