Information Framework

The banking and financial markets industry is tackling three core challenges head on. The first is focused on its medium-to-longer-term future and how the organization perceives the issues of revenue and risk. Central to the decision about what risks to accept is the need to accurately quantify those risks for trades, hedge funds, counter-parties and pricing. The management of risk is strategic to an organization's corporate intent and survival. The second area of focus is how to respond to the ever-growing demands of regulatory compliance including requirements such as Basel II/III,[5] the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA),[6] the Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO),[7] International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)[8] for International Accounting Standards (IAS), the Capital Adequacy Directive (CAD) and AntiMoney Laundering (AML) and others. The investments in meeting compliance requirements can be significant so the challenge is how to do this without impacting profitability. Organizations that can turn such investments into market advantage will reap the benefits. The third challenge is addressing the requirements of efficiency, growth and resiliency to provide more relevant, robust, timely, and cost-effective information to business decision makers. Customer retention is important in a volatile market, so attention must also be paid to enhancing the customer experience.

The BDW is a derivative of the BFMDW and contains content only relevant to the banking industry.

The FMDW is a derivative of the BFMDW and contains only content relevant to the financial markets industry.

The pace of change in the financial services industry has accelerated markedly in recent years. Mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of channel architecture, the development of technologies such as internet banking and telephone banking, the introduction of product bundling and the shift in focus from transactional systems to customer-facing systems, such as operational single view of customer, have all brought about extensive changes in the way financial services organizations operate. By necessity, standalone solutions have been developed, supported by an array of individual processes and procedures that often mimic and duplicate each other, but are sufficiently disparate to cause cost and training issues for financial services organizations, impairing the synergies and savings available to a coherent, strategic organization. A structured approach to any business or IT initiative is imperative to the success of projects. Utilizing the BPS models can act as the formal blueprint for process and services design and be utilized as a tool to bring both business and IT together.

There are many benefits to be derived from using the BPS models, such as:

• Increase customer satisfaction, grow the customer base and reduce the cost of selling and servicing customers
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes, making service delivery cheaper and quicker
• Identify processes that essentially do the same thing and therefore should be amenable to rationalization. This reduces training and maintenance overheads, improves your cost-income ratio and provides better and less costly service to your customers
• Be better able to ensure completeness in terms of regulatory compliance and risk management, potentially releasing capital to provide additional lending and investment capacity
• Designed to be understood by both business and IT, and acts as a communication bridge between communities.
• Provides an environment in which reuse possibilities can be identified and verified.
• Provides a firm basis on which integration or SOA solutions can be built.
• Allows you to construct services within a formalized model.
• Provides traceability from service definitions back to business requirements.

The BPS models have coverage in the following areas: Sales & Relationship Management; KYC/Account Opening; Lending; Card Products Administration; Commercial / Syndicated Lending; Mortgages; Trade Finance; Savings, Investments & Term Deposits; Transfer Services; Payments -Direct Debit / Credit Transfer / Deposit / Withdrawal; Cash Management; Wealth Management; Product & Marketing Management; Regulatory & Compliance; Best Execution/MiFID; Trade Processing; Corporate Actions; Asset & Liability Management; and Human Resource Administration.

The Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) is a comprehensive set of insurance specific models that represents best practices in insurance and is a natural extension to the Component Business Model. The IAA models provide the insurance specific business content to accelerate the projects that result from moving to an On Demand Business and pick up the definition of the components that take you there. IAA describes the business of the insurer and is an efficient communication bridge between business and technology communities. It is designed to be readily accessible to business users and by focusing on industry issues such as Sales and Customer Services, Marketing and Analytics, Customer Relationship Management, Policy Administration, Product Development, Insurance Claims and Risk and Compliance.

The IAA models have coverage in the following areas: LOB Customer Acquisition (Individual Insurance), LOB Underwriting (Individual Insurance), LOB Customer Acquisition (Group Insurance), LOB Policy Administration (Individual), LOB Claim Management (Individual), LOB Policy Administration / Claim (Group), Financial Transaction / Investment, Reinsurance Management, Intermediary Management, Provider Management, Human Resource Management, Customer Relationship Management, Marketing Management, Product Development, Risk Policy Management, Risk Mitigation and Assessment, and Risk Reporting and Review.