Development of a Business and Product Aligned Technology Plan for Corporate Finance
Client Business Issues:
Corporate finance department of our client, a global investment bank, had experienced rapid growth, putting an ever-increasing load on the systems and technology infrastructure supporting the department. Many of the business units within Corporate Finance were using different systems for booking, trading or clearing the same products. Several systems had been developed as tactical solutions; as such, they were built with technology that was not scalable. The systems required excessive manual administration and were not flexible enough to service new and revised products without substantial effort. Senior management was concerned that these technology limitations, if not addressed, would impede business growth.
Our Approach:
To address these concerns, Arc Partners developed an overall technology assessment and plan for Corporate Finance. This included defining the systems and technology needs of the department, and develop a plan to provide near and long term results. More specifically, Arc Partners:
- Assessed the current Corporate Finance systems and technology portfolio. Our team analyzed the systems’ ability to support current and anticipated business process requirements, and evaluated the technical characteristics such as flexibility, scalability and level of required support.
- Compared the systems and technology portfolio to those at key competitor banks. This included a benchmark to understand the systems available to corporate finance in other leading investment banks.
- Developed a target future state for the systems and technology portfolio based upon the business requirements, the competition’s capabilities and availability of modern, leading edge technology, where appropriate. The target state was developed to align with the bank’s overall systems architecture and infrastructure and take advantage of other corporate technology initiatives.
- Developed a near term transition plan to move the portfolio toward the target state. The plan was geared to deliver fast results and address high-priority business requirements. While the target state was based on a planning horizon of two to three years, the transition plan defined alternatives and deliverables that provided benefits in a six to twelve month time frame.
Value Received by Client:
Our client received a strategic plan that identified where it should focus technology investments to ensure that clear, measurable value is returned to the business while maintaining flexibility. The plan included a future state to serve as a directional objective and a near term, high impact improvement program to progress toward that target. Our client also received a comprehensive benchmarking assessment which helped them comprehend where they stood in relationship to identified industry trends, competitors and best practices.