Portfolio Masonry Boxed

Core Banking Program Recovery

Situation:
A core banking implementation program was in situation management and had failed to go live three times and had been put into situation management. The project team was not able to identify the cause of repeated failure.

 

This was not only resulting in losses due to sub par customer experience but also on account of maintaining the project team on an ongoing basis. The situation was further complicated by the project team not being able to attribute a cause to the failure because of which the project could not be closed for accounting purpose.

 

Approach:
A 360 degree review was conducted involving wing to wing review of project artefacts starting from examination of terms of reference through business requirements, technology solution review and examination of the vendor contract.

 

Various causes of failure were isolated and the current state determined. Conculsion of the review was lack of contractual clarity and accountability for requirements, specifications and design which was the reason for the project not being able to go live and team being made accountable.

 

A fast paced analysis and requirements definition exercise was undertaken with alignment to problem and outcome definition. This was followed by re-design of the technology solution, removing implementation bottlenecks and contracts updated to clearly define handovers, scope and accountability.

 

Three solution options along with costing and timelines were presented to the steering committee who chose a phased approach with reduced scope.

 

Outcome:

  • A$ 7.0 mill write off was avoided.
  • The project was recovered and addressed compliance, regulatory and audit issues that had been outstanding.
  • The project laid the foundation for a larger program involving A$ 180 mill spend resulting in revenue uplift of A$266 mill over 4 years.

Big Data solution

Objective
The project was commissioned by the regulatory authority of a city with a smart bus card system. At the time of project implementation there was no way to proactively determine when a commuter had been charged a wrong fare because of faulty bus hardware or manual intervention by the bus captain.  A lengthy investigation process was required to validate claims made by passengers about possible wrong fare occurrences.

 

The objective of this project was to devise an automated system to identify potential wrong fare occurrences and emerging fault trends in buses.

 

Solution
The project involved handling very large data volumes as there were more 15 million transactions per day translating to more than 5 billion historical transactions per year to be processed hence the decision to adopt Big Data technology. The solution stack included:

  • Hadoop for data storage and processing and MySQL for rapid reporting
  • Hive and NoSQL as query tools
  • Java and R Map Reduce for wrong fare detection algorithms
  • Pentaho for dashboards and reporting.

 

Benefits

  • Automated detection of wrong fare incidents and flagging of affected commuters’ cards.
  • Early warning of emerging fault trends in buses and other fare related equipment or operations, so that corrective action could be taken in a timely manner.

Risk grids for VaR calculation

 

Background
The Market Risk function of the Financial Markets business unit of a major Australian bank had implemented Algorithmics for calculating and managing VaR. The VaR models were customized to the specifications defined by the bank’s quantitative team. While this gave the risk managers granular control it was also a bottleneck for introducing new products because of the process for compliance and model review which could take up to 8 weeks before configuration of the solution even started.

 

Net result was a lead time of 26 weeks for introducing new product to the institutional market and a limitation on the range of products that could be offered.

 

Complications
In order to address the bottleneck, the bank’s quant team was looking at implementing risk grids for VaR calculation. While this was a possible solution given the complexity of extracting the transactional data from Murex and integration with other systems in the technology landscape the project had failed twice.

 

Approach
Janak Mistry took on the accountability for delivering the project and started with an agnostic approach collaborating with the broader business and technology teams to understand and resolve the issues. Solution options explored were:

  • Process re-design – this was not acceptable to the business even if it resulted in reduced time to market because of the need to maintain the process and ongoing system configurations.
  • Risk grids – this is the solution that was required by the business but had failed twice before due to application and integration complexity.

Upon gaining insights Janak Mistry led and worked closely with the broader business and technology teams to ensure:

  • Risk grids modeling approach was clearly articulated, tested and data requirements defined.
  • Data extract requirements were fine tuned to ensure that existing Murex technology infrastructure was able to support and sustain them.
  • Right module within Algorithmics suite identified and tested to avoid custom development.
  • Holistic solution architecture and specifications were defined before starting implementation to minimize risks and surprises.

 

Outcome

  • Ability to offer structured products to institutional clients enabled and all restrictions on the range of products that could be offered removed.
  • Speed to market for new products reduced to under six weeks from over 26 weeks.
  • Operational savings of $775,000.00 achieved annually as a result of process deprecation.

Digitization milestone for eftpos Payments Australia Limited

The eftpos Settlement Service (eSS) is a core function that leverages the benefits of the eftpos Hub processing service to drive increased value to Members and the Australian Payments Industry. It is also a major milestone in the digitization journey.

 

Problem:
eftpos needed to reduce the on boarding time for new members and decrease the processing complexity and costs for its members who are primarily banks and payment aggregators. Centralizing and automating the end of day settlement amongst the members using their Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Exchange Settlement Accounts (ESAs) was the business solution identified.

 

Issues:
While the eftpos hub and the applications comprising it are highly efficient it is very costly and time consuming to enhance them. Given the mission critical and high value of transactions that needed to be processed the system not only had to be robust, extremely secure, highly available (99.999%) but also cost effective to develop and not requiring specialized skills for ongoing development.

 

Solution:
After detailed analysis, design of a technology agnostic architecture, vendor interviews and proof of concept, a workflow engine based solution was identified as the appropriate approach. Infinity Process Platform (IPP) provided by SUNGARD was chosen as the platform for building the application. The choice of IPP was driven by the parent company background in delivering and maintaining mission critical infrastructure, the ease of development and IPP integration capabilities, especially with SWIFT. The solution also incorporated an embedded calculation engine developed in Java using in memory database to produce the end of day settlement figures and associated reports.

 

Outcome:
eSS enabled the centralized settlement of eftpos transactions processed via the eftpos Hub. eftpos determines the multi-lateral net settlement obligation for each Member, and initiates the settlement of those obligations through instructions to the Reserve Bank’s Information and Transfer System (RITS).

  • Timely implementation within budget.
  • eSS has eliminated around $1.25mill of annual operational costs for the member banks while reducing time for on-boarding new members from over 14 weeks to under 7 weeks.
  • The application can be enhanced without the need for specialized resources.

The service is designed to deliver increased efficiencies for Members’ internal business operations, removing legacy complexities to make the process easier and less onerous, especially when managing industry change.

Technology Evaluation & Vendor Selection

Workflow Automation and Task Management

 

Problem:
A mortgage broking company with more than 400 Franchisees employing 1100 staff was suffering from productivity loss, poor customer service, low franchisee morale and attrition.

 

Approach:
While productivity tool/s seemed like the obvious solution upon examinign the root cause it was discovered that lack of process definition was the primary cause. Combined with the lack of process definition multiple systems for loan processing from lead to settlement and unavailability of data or reporting to gauge productivity were the associated causes.

Workflow Automation in combination with Task Management was identified as one of the potential solutions. With the proliferation of vendors and technologies the company needed to establish facts.

  • What is the underlying technology?
  • Prevalent models in the market?
  • Industry best practices?
  • Comparison of price, functional and non-functional requirements?
  • Success factors?

 

Outcome:
Poseidon undertook extensive research leveraging its network and platform partnerships to uncover facts providing an objective comparison. The Research and Analysis done by Poseidon helped:

  • Helped identify the various categories of workflow automation and task management solutions available in the market.
  • Vendor approaches and product road map.
  • Comparison of Cloud and On Premise options.
  • Identify, negotiate and select the best of breed solution at a reasonable price.
  • Ensured that the selected solution was sustainable and could be extended across the enterprise.
  • Helped setup the project for success.

NPP vendor selection – Major Australian Bank

Context

A major Australian Bank wanted to participate in the New Payments Platform (NPP) scheme without being a direct subscriber. In order to adhere to the NPP deadlines and its payments strategy it needed to select an NPP sponsor urgently while adhering to best practices for vendor selection, company policies and maintaining probity.

 

Approach

Poseidon was able to leverage its experience and mobilise its network to conduct a gap analysis based on which the scope was agreed with the client. Working with the client team Poseidon was able to create the RFP consisting of:

  • Functional and non functional requirements
  • Technical specifications
  • Desired features to ensure fit with bank strategy and road map
  • Compliance with bank policies
  • Template for detailed commercial, technical and functional offer

 

Outcome

Poseidon facilitated the end to end process of sponsor review and selection fat a short notice over a period of 4 weeks. The process involved 2 major sponsors, 8 days of presentations an interview involving a total of 57 people from the vendors and bank stakeholder teams.

 

The client was guided to prepare the requirements and selection criteria which was recorded during the selection process. Poseidon’s readiness and structured approach not only ensured probity but provide the steering committee with analysis and compilation of detailed, complex and copious information to helping them make an informed and evidence based decision within a very tight time frame.