Implementation
Intelligent new product delivery
How a major bank saved £2,000,000 through evaluation of delivery options.
The corporate banking market is characterised by globalisation with CitiBank, HSBC, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank dominating International banking offering services that allow customers to enter new markets with all their banking requirements in place.
With a strategy of not to compete for global multinational customers but rather to focus on serving and dominating the UK market. To defend against customers using competitors for their international banking requirements Lloyds adopted a strategy of selective product development of international services to satisfy specific customer needs in their chosen target.
We were appointed as subject matter experts to analyse the market, develop a set of requirements and design a suite of services and present a viable proposition to defending this market. These included a number of product specific solutions of which International Direct Debits was one.
A structured approach to market analysis leading to a set of strategic product solutions gave us a clear direction. But when it came to implementing phase we hit a problem. In seeking development options internal IT and external suppliers provided us with alternative solutions, however all of which seriously undermined the business case.
We recommended that none of the above new build solutions be used but that the feasibility team go back into the organisation to evaluate existing networks, infrastructures that could be used to build the service.
We had learned about all the systems processes and recognised that there were many Payments and Receivables IT infrastructures and clearings already in place which could be used.
Our business analysis presented an in-depth capability of each system which made it easy for our customer to make smart choices on the options for design test and build.
Working in close cooperation with the middle management we were able to pull together a solution that was smart, seamless and offered a plan that had significant cost savings over an internal IT build. It took teamwork, a truly participative effort of internal departments and collaboration of systems but the results were truly innovative and this slashed the development budget to a quarter of the initial estimates.
We outsourced the network clearing taking a huge leap forward in the development cycle and worked with internal departments to negotiate the extra service delivery required so that we did not have to build IT systems. The solution had tweaked and refined existing networks, systems and processes for delivering an end to end service including detailed reporting and automated reconciliation.