Banking and Finance

Banking and finance fared comparatively well in the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis but the forecast remains challenging with pressures from:

• Increased competition in all markets
• Increased regulatory scrutiny and compliance, locally and overseas
• New business channels
• Risk management/mitigation strategies
• Consolidation/replacement of legacy applications
• On-going need to minimise cost ratios
• Changing shareholder and consumer activism

To compound events, recent high profile IT systems failures certainly haven’t helped industry confidence, attracting intense government and media attention and only increasing distrust and consumers’ lack of confidence.

Successful players will be those businesses that can enhance and integrate customer experiences, increase margins by reducing complexity in back-office operations, improve operating performance rather than raising fees, and deliver strategic solutions for diversification and integrate online and mobile services to increase scale. And cloud computing will increasingly play a dominant and far reaching role, presenting plenty of risk and regulatory challenges to be assessed.

The answer lies in harnessing technology to strip complexity out of products and processes, removing redundant applications, rationalising IT platforms to improve service levels, in short, making it easier for the customer.

Insurance

The 2011 series of natural disasters in Australia and overseas has highlighted pressures on the insurance sector still recovering from the Global Financial Crisis.

Recent years have been challenging for many insurance companies with:

• Increasing regulatory compliance and scrutiny
• Adverse claim profiles
• Mergers and acquisitions
• New business channels
• Changing consumer activism and expectation

Rapidly evolving business expectations are forcing insurers to uncover strategic opportunities for operational efficiency, diversity, integration and scale. Those companies that can develop and deliver technology solutions that are both strategic and able to provide rapid response to changing market conditions will be the winners.

Oakton has assisted both the insurers and the regulatory authorities, including APRA, Workcover,transform their processes and operations to deliver a competitive edge for insurance companies facing increasing complexity from:

• B2B integration, where securing and retaining clients through integration with brokers, agents, financial institutions and companies can only benefit from decreased complexity
• B2C service delivery where solving challenges related to internet access versus traditional channels and the challenge of general public self-service is an ever more important goal
• Statutory Compliance where processes,transaction systems, data warehouse and general ledger systems relating to claims reserving, earned premium, reinsurance and capital adequacy need constant renewal
• Business analytics where increasing returns are only possible through ever more responsive systems for client acquisition, client retention, portfolio analysis, pricing trends measured against claims ratios at the product, sales channel and regional levels
• Systems renewal refreshing or transforming legacy applications and outmoded structure to improve market assessment for COTS with functional and technology options to accommodate B2B & B2C.

Oakton’s financial services consulting experience

Oakton has for over 20 years, helped many financial sector organisations on strategic issues such as performance improvement, operating efficiencies, cost management and reduction and organisational effectiveness. We’ve helped clients implement reductions in the complexity of back-office operations to streamline processes and simplify decision making. We’ve also driven significant changes for other clients whereby we’ve dramatically improved performance by rationalising highly complex IT structure developed over many years. And yet for other clients, we’ve redesigned customer facing processes to help improve service levels.

In the last 12 months we’ve created tangible value for GE Money, Bendigo Bank, CBA and NAB.

To find out more about Oakton’s expertise in this area, please contact Adrian Selley, Brendon Trezise, James Watson or Shrav Malkani