2. Turning CRM into xRM
(for fund management)
Financial sector companies are facing more and more global competition
these days and need to differentiate their services to gain competitive
advantage. Inventing new products and services is not necessarily the way to
gain competitive edge. But developing entirely new business models and
business processes would provide better and longer lasting advantages, as
they are more difficult to copy and they create permanent value for the
company.
Despite this, most of the current IT systems used by the financial sector don’t
support rapid process development or easy business process innovations. A
substantial amount of the IT budget is invested to maintain and build qualifying
service systems services that are necessary to have, but don’t separate a company
from its competitors. Another common feature of the financial IT industry is the level
of system fragmentation. Customers are presented with several applications, such
as a loan register or portfolio management system.
There are many reasons behind this fragmentation. One of the main ones is the
huge amount of information that has to be processed and the complexities involved
in the service itself. Another equally important reason is the complexity in the
development work itself. In order to have projects that are manageable in size, they
end up being realized as isolated islands. The fragmentation leads to complex
integration projects, multiplication of data, bad services and eventually high costs.
And these systems do not help the companies find out who their best customers
are, how much they earn by serving them and what the service processes they use
are.
We believe that there is a clear need for a solution that enables both rapid process
innovation and saving of time and money. What if there was a tool that would, in
addition to that, have strong emphasis on customer service, provide excellent
connectivity, scale to large data sets and offer open database views and tools?
One platform that could take care of all businesses in both sides of the balance
sheet would make a revolution. Think about the cost savings, improvements in
quality of information and new possibilities in creating new services.
Originally published in the Finance on Windows Partner Guide 2010/11
3. Turning CRM into xRM
(for fund management)
Well, obviously we believe there is a tool that handles all these wishes and more.
Microsoft has turned customer relationship management (CRM) into xRM, where
the x stands for any relationship. We have gone even further and used this platform
to produce something totally new – not just renaming customer relationship.
The xRM platform provides endless possibilities for innovative minds. We can build
applications with very little or no programming and implement them with astonishing
speed. And we don’t need to sacrifice functionality, as sophisticated business logic
can be implemented with software plug-ins. A system handling the transactional
side of asset and fund management combined with a full-blown CRM system would
already be a dream come true for many customers. But when we introduce basic
CRM functionality like activities, workflows and office integration into the
transactional side of the system, you can really invent new ways of streamlining in-
house processes. And it is easy to build new innovative services for internal and
external customers. Our aim is to give users a clear view on workflows in
consolidated dashboards, where users need interact with the systems only when
predefined rules cannot be applied. Time is spent with exception handling instead
of process handling.
There is a famous saying about silver bullets and software engineering: there has
not been nor will be any single revolutionary change that would drastically change
productivity of software development. But the revolution in productivity arises from
avoiding a lot of software engineering.
Our xRM effort is focused on areas where we can create additional value for our
customers and their customers. More and more IT service companies are providing
xRM-based solutions and one can also easily combine in-house development with
xRM applications bought from other IT shops. This will open completely new doors
for cooperation between the bank or insurance company and its IT vendor you can
build or buy, or do both. xRM also opens a totally new way of collaboration among
IT shops too, as they can combine their own knowledge with xRM applications
delivered by another IT vendor. This model of combining functionality from several
vendors into one platform is unique and we expect it to provide great benefits to our
clients.
This has been a revolutionary road for our team and our customers to go down and
we feel that we have already invented something totally new and I dare say that we
are just at the beginning of our journey. With xRM we can provide our customers
fast implementation with our readymade -applications combined with customer
specific tailoring. To sum up, by using xRM technology we can provide agility in
development, less vendor dependency and lower costs.
Pekka Häkkinen is a partner at Model IT
Originally published in the Finance on Windows Partner Guide 2010/11
4. Model IT Ltd
Model IT Ltd serves financial sector companies by providing consultancy,
tailor-made solutions and ready-made technology. Our customers work with
banking, insurance or investment operations. Our solutions are innovative
and provide high quality with proven customer satisfaction. Our bread and
butter are analytical and computational applications, and most recently
Microsoft's xRM technology applications in financial business.
Model IT Ltd
Pekka Häkkinen, Partner
We can extend life span of your current systems by introducing new
Phone: +358 40 77 666 00
functionality. We can add high-end risk measurement or performance
Pekka.hakkinen@modelit.fi
analysis packages to work with your existing platform. And IFRS
computations. Or we can provide you with our brand new xRM based fund
www.modelit.fi
and asset management application: all-in-one from CRM to authority
reporting.
Or we can create something completely new to solve a problem or to create
a unique service. Challenges are welcome.
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