Delivery Director & Founder, Bluefin Solutions
Media and Finance
The challenges facing banks and insurance companies are well documented and in recent times have been played out in the public spotlight. At the heart of it is an industry in turmoil where organisations are struggling to rebuild their balance sheets in the face of increased regulation, a global recession (which they are largely held responsible for) and rapidly changing business models driven by technological advances.
Adding on to these challenges, many organisations still have core systems which are very old and have been adapted over time to deal with things they weren't designed for, such as expansion outside of national boundaries (e.g. multiple currencies and languages), the ability to handle multiple products and other things we now take for granted. Furthermore, growth by acquisition has led to complex estates with many different systems and thousands of interfaces in play - making system consolidation an extremely daunting prospect.
Although the stakes are high, rewards will be great for those organisations which can adapt most quickly. Invariably, technology is seen as the enabler, making for some of the toughest projects in the IT industry.
So what does SAP have to offer?
The Finance industry is very broad and has a number of sub-verticals, each with its own unique challenges and needs. The industry is a strategic focus for SAP and the investment that has been put into the industry solutions such as the Core Banking product and Bank Analyzer is huge (£100m +).
SAP products fall into 3 broad categories
Core back-office solutions, such as Finance, Procurement, HCM and Asset Management. These are solutions for the generic functions that most organisations have. SAP has traditionally done reasonably well here in the finance industry as the core R/3 solution scaled well and was very robust and secure. SAP's ECC 6 carries on this tradition.
Platform based solutions such as NetWeaver BW and the BusinessObjects tools. These can provide an enterprise wide foundation for reporting and analytics, planning and forecasting and profitability analysis.
Industry solutions such as Bank Analyzer for analytical banking and Core Banking for transactional banking, Claims and Incentive Management and Collections and Disbursements for Insurance. These products have been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of finance organisations. They can also be further tailored to meet bespoke requirements.
Bluefin Solutions' credentials
Bluefin Solutions has worked with a number of organisations in the finance industry to implement solutions to complex business challenges using SAP. Here are some project examples:
- One of the first Claims Management analytics solutions in the UK for a leading insurance company.
- Mobile approval applications on iPhone and Blackberry for a leading Investment Bank.
- An Asset Backed Securitisation (ABS) solution for a provider of automotive finance.
- An analytics solution for the Collections and Disbursements module of the Insurance Industry Solution to allow the reporting on insurance policies, the payments due from the policy holders and payments that have been made.
- An end to end evaluation of the BusinessObjects platform to understand the implementation impact on a Bank's infrastructure and to demonstrate how various products can meet sophisticated reporting and analytics requirements.