Our marketplace is becoming more and more demanding every day – and there's a limit to what we can afford to do to keep pace!
Every time the Chancellor gets to his feet he adds another line of administrative cost to our business. Meanwhile, policymakers are simultaneously forcing us to decrease the overhead we are able to recoup in our sale. The 1% world of the Stakeholder Pension is only truly possible for a new business. N2 blurs the definition between our house sales operation and the IFAs. And those are only two of the more obvious examples.
The FSA demands complete transparency of cost, quicker completion of transactions, with more escape clauses for consumers and complete on-line security for web customers. It's death by a thousand regulations for ‘traditional’ financial services organisations. We simply cannot satisfy all of the demands being placed upon us.
Recognising that existing systems cannot cope with the modern trading environment is easy. They lack the requisite flexibility to cope with new dynamic market models. The amount of re-coding work required in every back-office is growing every day. The IT is firmly in control of the organisation.
But finding a solution is very tough. The disparate systems which characterise every financial services organisation that has more than 5 years' history offer no simple answers.
Surely what's needed is a complete overhaul. But how could the enterprise survive the cost and upheaval?
When the regulators get together, the industry collectively does a sharp intake of breath, closes its eyes and hopes for the best. And ‘the best’ is no more regulation! This is not to deny that the industry needs reform, that the customer needs protection from unscrupulous individuals and organisations. It's just that regulation kills business.
For most IT infrastructures, even the simplest stipulations can involve arduous and extensive work-arounds, patches and recodings. Depending on the nature of new regs, development work can take months to complete, test and roll-out.
Typically, regulatory changes have their impact in ‘general’ conditions (i.e. all instances matching a set of conditions, within a product type). And this plays into eXii's hands.
eXii separates common elements, or components, of programming from product specific records and details. That means that the components which require modification thanks to regulatory changes are readily identifiable, quickly reconfigured, and instantly imposed across every instance where the new regulation applies.
It's so simple that business users can do it. IT needn't get involved!
And if that wasn't a strong enough ‘sale’ for eXii, here's another. eXii offers a facility (we call it ‘eXii.i’) which records the details of every event in the system, including the nature of the event itself, what caused it and the chain which stemmed from it. It escalates any event which breaches established parameters in real-time to designated users – which means that you can react in the ‘now’. And it allows users to interrogate data on both a batch and an individual level. Why is this important? The FSA demands that businesses can demonstrate their ability to assess and manage their risk on an ongoing basis. eXii allows you to assess and manage your risk at any time in an instant, not at the quarter end after an arduous reporting run.
eXii can do this because eXii is designed specifically for financial services businesses. It has been put together by technologists who understand the demands of the sector and who know how IT issues have developed as the industry has grown, shifted and accelerated.
Furthermore, eXii can be adopted – by any organisation running any platform – at a cost base well below the cost bases typically being borne for maintenance of existing systems. That's new for old and a saving too.