Financial firms have been facing a trifecta of challenges in recent years as they find they have to increase efficiency, reign in costs, and cope with a growing list of regulatory demands. All this must be done while serving a customer base that increasingly expects high levels of customer service and personalized attention.
At HP, financial firms can tap solutions to these challenges individually, or as part of a comprehensive integrated solution.
Boosting Efficiency
In terms of operational efficiency, a series of products designed for banking, insurance and capital markets companies can help financial firms tackle company-wide efficiency challenges, as well as those facing specific areas, such as mortgage processing, payments processing or mobile agent issues.
HP OpenView Business Process Insight (BPI) proactively tracks the progression of mortgages using key performance indicators. By tracking the progress of loans more carefully, firms can spot instances where loans are falling behind in the cycle early in the process, and correct problems before they stagnate.
HP Mobile Agent moves critical business processes to the point of sale or service. This means field adjusters can assess damages, make estimates, apply fraud detection tools, obtain pricing agreements and even capture signatures while on the road. The processing occurs in real time rather than at end of day.
The HP Adaptive Enterprise Framework provides a real-time enterprise-wide view across customer channels, business processes and data silos of a firm. This comprehensive customer view can help financial firms improve the customer experience. For banks, this means integrating branch systems with ATMs, call centers and Web sites. For insurance companies, it means ensuring that agents, call centers and Web sites can provide consistent information. By ensuring that systems are streamlined and facilitating the creating of risk-based pricing strategies, HP Adaptive Enterprise can help banks and insurance companies attract today’s comparison-shopper consumer with competitive prices rather than persuasion.
HP Adaptive Enterprise can also help with the merger pains of these rapidly consolidating industries by identifying and eliminating redundant infrastructure and hardware. For payments, this streamlining of systems combined with a comprehensive view of the payments processing chain has helped firms improve payments efficiency.
For asset management firms, who have increasingly been entering into new asset classes, the HP Adaptive Enterprise Framework facilitates rapid integration across disparate systems, so introducing new products and services is simple. Its ability to streamline and automate business processes can help free staffing costs, so staff can be diverted to more profitable areas.
Regulatory Compliance
On the compliance front, to meet today’s regulatory needs financial firms must store, protect and provide access to data at all stages of the life cycle. HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System ensures that the data entered into a company’s systems is also retrievable. RISS combines advanced indexing with a grid computing storage architecture that allows it to deliver the most powerful search and retrieval capability in the industry. Its risk controls include the automatic migration of data to the archive, the protection of data with time stamps and digital signatures and the ability to provide certified proof that documents have not been tampered with.
As for compliance solutions for specific regulations, the HP ITSM (IT Service Management) Reference Module is ideal for complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and its requirement that management accept responsibility for the effectiveness of internal controls. HP ITSM is based on ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), one of the most widely accepted approaches to IT Service Management in the industry. It integrates with the COSO and COBIT frameworks, both of which outline standards against which businesses can assess their internal controls.
HP OpenView, which can be used in connection with RISS or on its own, provides visibility into controls, including documented audit trails, automatic incident notification, and proactive problem identification and resolution. It includes controls for collecting, processing and acting on incidents, controls for understanding impacted services, controls for identifying root causes, predefined applications controls and instructions for actions, controls to monitor transactions running on the infrastructure and controls to correlate service performance metrics.
Extending Competitive Reach
Meanwhile, HP has been extending its reach deeper into the financial industry, with solutions aimed at helping banks increase their competitiveness in terms of how they serve customers. HP’s OpenBank.NET helps clients improve the total customer experience, regardless of which channel a customer uses to interact with the bank. Created by HP in partnership with Microsoft, OpenBank.NET is a multi-channel retail banking architecture framework. HP OpenBank.NET’s standards-based solution seamlessly integrates the front office with back-end operations, including core processing systems, data warehousing systems, customer data at the channels and external sources. This allows customer relationship managers, whether in call centers or at a branch, to see information that customers have recently entered into a Web site and to view the status of issues customers have raised through a different channel. HP OpenBank.NET also provides business managers with real time visibility into business trends such as cross-selling effectiveness, attrition or fraud control.
The HP Branch-in-a-Box allows firms to fine-tune branch productivity with a service-delivery architecture that simplifies automation. For financial companies challenged by equipment and staffing costs, this alternative gives clients a one-stop-shopping solution for acquiring, managing and supporting equipment ranging from high performance servers to desktops, software or mobile devices. For a single per-branch monthly fee – without upfront capital outlays – clients of all sizes can acquire state-of-the-art equipment and services tailored to their environments. An HP Program Manager works with the client to coordinate the project, implement best practices, and provide regular progress updates.